RE: [squid-users] How important is harddisk performance?

To a degree I agree with Matus in that the type of load is important. It is also important to keep in mind how you plan to setup cache dirs, and cache replacement. If you configure squid to cache most stuff to RAM, then disks are not as important as RAM....although RAM is really always the most important because it is faster and why would you want to cache stuff to a slower medium when you can cache it to faster medium.
 
If you can afford the faster disks, get them....although I would suggest that you be sure to get an I20 capable card like an adaptec because you can further improve performance by offloading disk IO operations (to an extent anyway) away from the kernel to the controller. I have know idea if, much less how much, Squid itself would improve its performance from this, but I20 capable cards are affordable.
 
I was having a discussion with some of my coworkers about SATAII versus SCSI....some felt that one was worth more than the other given costs and ease of management.
 
In general, identify how your users will be using it and how plan the cache replacement policy and setup. Are your users going to be downloading files, or just web content? What sizes files will you cache to disk versus cache to RAM....etc.
 
Nick

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From: rihad [mailto:rihad_at_mail.ru]
Sent: Tue 12/23/2008 12:44 AM
To: squid-users_at_squid-cache.org
Subject: [squid-users] How important is harddisk performance?

Hi there.

I'm planning to build a new dedicated Squid-box, with amd64 and 4 gigs
of RAM, with two cache_dir's on two separate harddisks and Squid-3 doing
application level striping, all servicing around 6k users. Will two
recent IDE disks of 7200 rpm suffice, or I'm better off getting two
15000 rpm SCSI disks on a dedicated controller board? Just not sure if
performance gains would be noticeable by an average user, given enough
ram. I read this too: http://wiki.squid-cache.org/BestOsForSquid
Just double checking.

Thanks for any tips.
Received on Tue Dec 23 2008 - 15:05:49 MST