OK, we now have the campus cache admin (Derek) on-board on this issue.
and he has provided answers to your questions, which I append, and
has asked me to progress the matter.
The configuration file is a sizeable document, so, rather than to
fling copies of it out to the whole list, I have stashed a copy here:
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/tests/campus-squid.conf
Derek adds the following remark:
|  I'm not convinced there is a problem with Sun's memory management
|but if other sites using squid on non SUN platforms and with a
|similar load to ours are not reporting problems then there may be
|something in it.  I use the dlmalloc library for speed rather than
|the SUN malloci.
----appended responses----
Hi Alan,
  Thanks for looking into this problem we all seem to have.  I've been trying
to approach it systematically by changing one thing at a time but it won't go
away.  I've attached  a copy of the squid.conf file which we use on all off the
caches and provided answers to the questions Henrik raised. I also think this
is a genuine problem with the cache software  or its configuration since all
the recent changes and upgrades I have made have failed to get rid off it.
Regards
Derek
INFO.
>  a) What OS is the capus cache running on?
 The campus cache systems are thre SUN Ultra 5's with 270 MHz cpus and 512
MBytes memory each. Each system has 4 x 4 GByte ultras SCSI disks connected
with 2 each on separate controllers.  Network interfaces are 100 Mbit/s.
The caches have a fairly high throughput with typically between 6 -7 Million
requests per day ( see figures below).
Figures for 8 May
*****************
Total Requests                                  6882692
Volume - Total Mbytes                           42527.195
Peak Time                                       12:15 - 12:29
Peak Requests per hour                          666315
Cache Performance
            No.         %           Kb/s        std.dev
Hits        3380997     49.1        4.272       6.021
Direct      3226438     46.9        1.439       5.667
Error       275257      04.0
Figures for April 2002
**********************
Total Requests                                  149024734
Volume - Total Mbytes                           1014860.656
Peak day                                        30 Apr
Peak Requests per day                           7473809
Cache Performance
            No.         %           Kb/s        std.dev
Hits        68685219    46.1        7.727       6.428
Direct      70527355    47.3        2.076       5.468
Error       9812160     06.6
>  b) What Squid configure options has been used?
# ./configure  --prefix=/usr/local/squid --enable-snmp --enable-async-io --enabl
e-storeio=diskd,ufs,aufs --enable-dlmalloc=./dlmalloc.o --enable-removal-policie
s=heap,lru
>  c) What type of cache_dir is it using?
  The caches are currently using aufs for cache_dir. I tried using diskd on our
test cache for a while but it was fairly unstable.
cache_dir aufs /cache1  3500 16  256
cache_dir aufs /cache2  3500 16  256
cache_dir aufs /cache3  3500 16  256
cache_dir aufs /cache4  3500 16  256
Cache directories are mount using the noatime option.
>  d) Which compiler was used to compile Squid?
 gcc version 2.95.1 19990816 (release)
>  e) Do the campus cache use any peers?
  The three cache are configured as sibling off each other but do not peer with
any external caches.
---end---
Received on Mon May 13 2002 - 05:22:37 MDT
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