[squid-users] About parents and memory pools

I have situation in which I have to use backbone-providers cache-farm as
parent. Farm is under one hostname (ie. multiple IPs). I've looked to
cachemgr and noticed that Squid does recognize these IPs, but does Squid
distribute fetches to all those IPs balanced?

Farm is using Inktomi, but they won't allow ICP-connections and port 7 is
closed, so I'm also wondering if Squid can detect if parent dies and stops
using it, or is this only possible while using ICP-parents? If it does,
does it recognize that only one IP is dead and keeps using the others?

I also have one question regarding memory pools - I'm running my Squid
(2.4STABLE6) on Linux 2.4.18. I'm interested in disabling memory pools so
that kernel would take more care about memory allocation and swapping, but
does this hurt performance much?

I've also read about using different malloc-lib for Squid, and somebody
suggested gnu-malloc - I guess I'm already using it, isn't it part of
glibc anyway?

My cache has 4500000 on-disk objects in 30GB cache and I've been very
happy with my Squid since I started using it - 768MBs RAM and P3-866 has
been sufficient to serve 4000-5000 clients daily.

-- 
Pauli Borodulin
boro@fixel.org