[squid-users] Squid Configuration, and other niggling things ....

Hi guys,
            I have been using squid for a while as a small scale proxy, and
have not worried too much about its configuration, however, a project that
requires the use of squid has brought to light some points i have been
unable to clarify.

Firstly, we are running squid on an ISDN connection, so we have a
theoretical maximum bandwidth of 16KB/s to play with. The test (production)
site (it is a school) has a maximum of 200 simultanious users, and during
lesson times its very likley that there will be 3 groups of 24 clients
looking at possibly the same content (thats say 3 seperate classes, one
looking meep.com, the second foo.com, and the third bar.com).

System wise we currently are running a PPro 100 with 128 MB of RAM, and a
six Gig SCSI II (uw ?) 7.5kRPM drive (log files are stored on a seperate
IDE drive) (It will be upgraded pending this trail)

My queries are the following :
+ What should one use for the cache_dir options ? how many directories, and
what is a recommended size (it is currently ag 600MB) (rest, default)

+ What should the memory usage options be configured as ? currently i am
using cache_mem = 32

+ As this is an experimental system + some extra software other than squid,
we have made use of squid's SNMP functions and use MRTG to draw lots of
pretty graphs ... however, we need to know which (if any graph) shows the
ratio of say requests fetched from cache to the requests fetched from forign
server ... ie, we need to prove to the people who have the budgets that the
cache does make a difference to "their internet experience" (as they like to
call it !) and the way to do that is give them a picture saying it does so !
(we also want the data for research)

- On that point as well, we have had a strange thing in the log files, where
our connection which is only 16KB, the graph of cacheserverinoutkb shows a
very large spike in the order of several hundred kB/s ... additionally at
the same time the number of requests a second (more on this later) shows a
spike of 80 req / sec ( ithink ... please check the images on
http://proxy.trinity.idium.eu.org/mrtgstat/squid.htm Note this has fallen
off the current graph and on to the 30min avg ... which is alot less than
the 5min avg ... the anomalies are shown on cachehttpinoutkb,
cacheserverinoutkb, cacheserverrequests, cacheprotoclienthttprequests

+ Finally, what do all the different stats mean which have something to do
with requests recieved per second from clients ?

Thanks (i think that is all for now),
Any help would be greatly apreciated

Regards,
Dave
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Received on Thu Apr 26 2001 - 13:50:21 MDT