Re: an idea about dual cpus

Alex Rousskov wrote:
>
> On Mon, 15 Nov 1999, Dustin Byford wrote:
>
> > Our setup is currently consuming 80% of the cpu (average) with regular
> > peaks to 100%. The machine is not io or network bound. So in an effort
> > to fix the situation I was thinking about using smp. What does everyone
> > think about this.
> >
> > Run 2 squid processes under different config files/log files/etc. Let
> > them use icp to talk to each other through loopback. Give each process
> > 2 of the 4 disks. This way each squid process will get scheduled on 1
> > cpu. Of course the overhead of icp may be to inefficient. What do you
> > think?
>
> a) Are you already using dual CPUs? I would not be surprised if a
> single Squid installation benefits from using smp.

No this is a single PII-400 over clocked to 500 MHz, 125 MHz bus, 41 MHz
PCI, 1G RAM, 4 18G u2w drives.

RAM, network, and disk are all doing very well. It's just the CPU
that's holding us back. Currently it looks like we will get around 3M
hits a day. Soon this should go up as we double our outgoing
connection. First of all does this sound normal? Should I track down
what is using all the CPU and simply quit doing it?

Async-io is an option but previously when we turned it on squid would
crash every few hours.

If this is normal it seems like instead of splitting up our hardware and
having 2 boxes connected through a "slow" 100 Mbit ethernet link with
512 MB RAM, 2 18G drives. It would be a better utilization of our
hardware to use a smp box with each squid process talking through the
system bus. We do have memory to spare for digests and the such.
Perhaps using 2 100 Mbit ethernet cards if network becomes a problem,
maybe we could run 2 squids as 2 wccp caches and let the router take
care of splitting up requests.

If this continues to be a problem I think we will try a dual celeron 500
with the above idea. Of course I'll let everyone know how it goes.

>
> b) If you have to run two Squids and are afraid of ICP overheads,
> give Cache Digests a try.

>
> c) Please share your SMP experience with others when you find a good
> working solution.
>
> $0.02,
>
> Alex.

Thanks everyone for all the replies.

                                        --Dustin
Received on Tue Nov 16 1999 - 01:59:24 MST