[squid-users] Squid performance? with Net(or other free)BSD vs RedHat Linux

        I am dedicating a machine to Squid. I intend to use squid 2.5,
Squid-Guard, with SAMBA to manage the windows clients, Apache - to
accelerate our local stuff and hopefully intergrate Webmin, and the
standard unix tools (PERL, GCC, etc). My current candidate is a dual
processor Sparc 10 with lots of memory (512MB RAM) and disk space (18G
of which 75% or more is potential cache). Even though its an older
machine I believe its more than adequate. I suspect that the greatest
improvements come with disk space and RAM, since the fastest responses
should come when data requested is in memory.

        I have never really analized Squid's potential bottlenecks in
relation to the OS. Since it seems RedHat is not interested in Sparcs
if NetBSD performs as well or better, and I'm setting up a dedicated
machine, so now (while I have a machine that is not in production in
any sense) would be a good time to change. Pretty much I want to set
it up to maximize my hit ratio and minimize my use of bandwidth
outside the building.

I have been testing with RedHat 6.2 a little and it works well enough
- though it seems I have somehow introduced the file-descriptor
problem. Squid runs with a limit of 4096 file descriptors with no idea
how it got there. It may be because I have both an older RPM version,
I put on just to test large cache sizes and some http acceleration. I
let 2.5 run with the defaults briefly to see if I managed to compile
it.

        Since 90 per cent of what this machine will be doing is Squid,
I thought this was a good place to ask. Is there anyone who keeps
statistics on how Squid performs under different architectures or OSs?
Is there a test suite I could use to test and compare performance? (A
PERL script to use as a regression test.) Needless to say I don't want
to actually write anything myself, though I would gladly report my
results. While there are some tools to monitor performance - they seem
to be mostly for Squids in production.

        When browsing through http://www.squid-cache.org I saw a test
of a machine entered in a "cache-off" and noticed it was using a
"customized" FreeBSD Kernel. (And considerable more disk space than I
have.) This is what started me wondering about using an alternative
SMP Kernel to start with. It als started me wondering if there was a
page comparing Squid with various OSs and hardware architectures.

-- 
Josh Kuperman                       
josh@saratoga.lib.ny.us