Re: [squid-users] Hardware Recommendations

at the risk of repeating what has been posted here before, here are some considerations.
 these are based on my experience with squid and hardware, almost all on reverse-proxy/acceleration setups:
 
 - get fast disk. ignore information that says SATA is just as good as SCSI. nothing beats 15K RPM SCSI drives, and get ones with lowest seek times
 - don't use RAID. just don't. it's a cache, and if you lose a disk, I might argue that even if it's mirrored, the degradation during a rebuild might be too much. just let the disk go, kiss its contents good bye, and install a replacement
 - get a lot of disk, and put one cache_dir on it. don't use up the whole disk, read the FAQ on memory usage, and make sure you're not giving too much to disk. it'll be fast at first, but if it's too big, then you'll be sorry later when it's full. :)
 - put your logs on a different physical spindle as a cache_dir. or better yet, don't log all the time. :)
 - mount ext2, noatime
 
 those things I've found to be the fastest.
 
 oh also: contrary to popular belief, I don't have numbers on it, but I don't think that there is a huge diminishing return with adding over 3 spindles.
 I have 6 spindles, and they are a huge improvement over just 2 or 3 spindles.
 
 --john

----- Original Message ----
From: Matus UHLAR - fantomas <uhlar@fantomas.sk>
To: squid-users@squid-cache.org
Sent: Thu Oct 13 01:02:08 2005
Subject: Re: [squid-users] Hardware Recommendations

On 12.10 20:30, Timothy Bushart wrote:

Please, set up quoting in your mail client...

> On 12.10 14:13, TBUSHART@nycap.rr.com wrote:
> > Can anyone help and make any recommendations from their experiences for
> > hardware requirements for a new install of two LVS Load balancers
> > forwarding to two Squid Real Servers. I?ve got the LVS servers in
> > place, but for the squid boxes,
>
> > should I use multiple hard drives with
> > Raid 5 or Mirror two 15K SCSI drives,
>
> no! if RAID, only RAID1 (mirror), if you can afford it, read more on:
> http://www.squid-cache.org/Doc/FAQ/FAQ-3.html#ss3.11

> Raid 1, 2 146GB 15k SCSI Mirrored Drives for OS and Logs, and two partitions
> for cachedir's..

only one cache_dir on one drive (or mirror). Using more cache_dir's on the
same disk is just inefficient.

> could I get away with:
>
> cache_dir diskd /cache1 32000 16 256
> cache_dir diskd /cache2 32000 16 256
> (Each partition will be 64GB, only use 32GB for cache on each partition)

that should be OK, you can even use bigger cache (48GB)

> Recommendations call for one cache_dir per disk, but if you have two disks
> mirrored RAID1, does that mean use a single cache_dir.... or will two
> cache_dirs suffice?... because the larger the cache_dir the more memory
> used...

RAID1 here behaves as one disk and that means you should use single cache_dir
on it.

> Currently in production we have two squid servers - pentium III's 1.5GHZ's
> raid 5 (3 76GB Drives) with 4 cache_dirs...Only about a 1-2 second delay

if you set up no raid or raid1 here (and use one cache_dir per raid), you'd
probably notice berformance advantage, even with hardware raid, and
especially with software raid. maybe you won't need new machines at all :-)

> before a web page is brought up This is with cache_peer parents that are new
> McAfee webshield web scanners, and 2 new DNS servers that receive about 20
> queries/sec. This was inherited from someone that left the company. We have
> to upgrade and want to make sure performance increases with new hardware and
> doesn't decrease. I read somewhere some guy upgraded his squid system with
> new hardware and his users started complaining that the web slowed down, I
> trying not to be that guy, and I'm reading alot...www.squid-cache.org

-- 
Matus UHLAR - fantomas, uhlar@fantomas.sk ; http://www.fantomas.sk/
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