Re: 20GB IDE and Redhat 6.0

At 11:34 AM 9/29/99 +1000, barneys wrote:
>We are looking at building a squid proxy using 2 IDE drives, a 3.2GB for
>Redhat 6.0 and Squid and a 20.4GB Quantum hard disk for the cache.
>
>Redhat 6.0 is the OS that we know so it is our preferred option. Is there
>any major problems with using redhat 6.0 with squid? Is there any tricks
>or changes that we should make for squid to run reliably?
>
>Bearing in mind that we expect the proxy to only have about 30-50
>concurrent sessions at a time. Does anyone see anything wrong with using a
>20GB IDE drive for the cache?

There is only 2 things:

1) the ext2 file-system takes some time to mount such a disk. I have 2 18GB
UW SCSI disks on a Linux box and it takes 30 seconds to mount. If you are
that lucky that a fsck is forced it takes 30 minutes before the box is
operational. I think the next time I will go for a fs which can do without
an extensive fsck. (any suggestions?)

2) It is better, performance wise, to go for multiple smaller SCSI disks.
Squid spreads the load nicely over the disks. If performance is required
multiple SCSI disks (eg 4x 6G) will give better performance. The seek time
needed to go from one sector to another on the same disk is killing you.
Don't use 2 disks on the same IDE port. If cost is the deciding issue the
20G IDE will serve you just fine. You just have to pay the price in a
reduced performance.

Marc

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Marc van Selm
NATO C3 Agency
Communication Systems Division, A-Branch
Tel: +31 70 3142454
E-mail: marc.van.selm@nc3a.nato.int

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Private: selm@cistron.nl, selm@het.net, http://www.cistron.nl/~selm
Received on Wed Sep 29 1999 - 02:03:34 MDT