Re: [squid-users] squid on moderate scales

Payal Rathod wrote:

> Hi,
> A friend of mine, a lab teacher, at a college is going to install squid
> on her college's Mandrake 10.0 official machine. She will use the default
> squid-2.5 Stable4 rpm cos' she is very new to unix. The problem is that
> there will be around 300 students using it as a proxy server plus
> around 25 teachers. Students will get access to a few sites and teachers
> to all.

Not familiar with mandrake, but we use debian with the package from the
stable distro (woody). IMHO there is no reason to build your own squid
if you can live with the provided release.

> Now, my question is that will the default squid bundled in the
> OS be able to handle all the load? The machine is big, PIV 2Ghz with 1Gb swap
> and fast SCSI drives with 512Mb RAM (a gift from a leading computer
> company). This is the first time they are using a free OS in the
> college and I will be giving help from outside for squid.conf.
> Can someone share her/his experience with this load? The server will
> just have a caching dns and maybe a dhcp server with the same (not
> sure).

Same machine here, but with no swap but 1GB RAM.
We have around 1000 clients. FD Usage is about 300, this way I guess
that I have never more than 150 clients accessing the cache simultaneously.
Works fine with a 5MBit adsl line, the only problem are huge downloads
which I am unable to block.
If you limit the site for most of the clients (i.e. the students) this
will be no problem for your machine.
Keep an eye on memory usage, i.e. don't make the cache_dirs to large.
What is the uplink bandwith?

Regards, Hendrik Voigtländer
Received on Mon Aug 02 2004 - 11:08:10 MDT