New cache has poor hit rate on same URLs?

Over the weekend I did my 3rd clean setup of a Squid cache. I'm now
seeing the same behavior that I've observed previously: the cache
doesn't return many hits, even on the same URLs, until it has been in
use for a while.

For example, access 5 URLs from a given client, close the browser,
then reopen the browser and access the same 5 URLs. In a mature
cache, there will be more hits than are seen from a cache newly
created before the 1st 5 accesses.

I want to emphatically state that this is *not* a Squid configuration
issue. Prior to this weekend I ran Squid v2.3S2 on a RedHat v6.0
system. After doing a clean install (not upgrade) of RedHat v6.2, I
reinstalled Squid v2.3S2 (replacing RH's v2.3S1). I then copied over
the same "squid.conf" used previously and did a "squid -z" to build
the cache dirs.

I ran the same kernel version (2.2.15) under both versions of the
RedHat distro. Both this cache and the previous one ran on the same
hardware: P2/450 and 256MB of RAM.

Has anyone else seen this behavior? I don't understand why Squid's
cache has to "age" for a while until the hit rate gets reasonable.

Thank you.

*** Steve Snyder ***
Received on Mon May 15 2000 - 08:50:29 MDT