Re: [squid-users] speeding up browsing? any advice?!

> Hi,
>
> On Sun, 10 May 2009, Roland Roland wrote:
>
>> users on my network have been complaining of slow browsing sessions for
>> a
>> while now..
>> i'm trying to figure out ways to speed sessions up without necessarily
>> upgrading my current bandwidth plan...
>
> Squid may help with this. However, you don't seem to say that you have
> determined the cause of the slowness yet. One potential reason is your
> users are saturating the available bandwidth. Another however, is that
> you
> have loss on a link somewhere. Another might be your ISP over-contending
> you or not giving you the bandwidth you expect. Another might be slow
> DNS.
>
> Squid might indeed help in any or all of these situations. However, I'd
> be
> inclined to monitor the edge router device with MRTG or similar and track
> exactly how much bandwidth is being used. Also, I'd run smokeping across
> the link to some upstream sites and see have you any packet loss. If you
> know the cause, you'll be better able to address the problem.
>
>> though one more question if possible, is there anything i could
>> possibly do to speed up browsing aside what i mentioned earlier?
>>
>> keep in mind that i only added an allow ACL to my subnet... and that's
>> it! is it enough?
>
> For a start, you may want to look at increasing the cache_dir size. The
> default is 1GB which is pretty small.

1GB? only on the newest squid. The slightly older ones more commonly used
have a measly 100MB.

Also update the dir type. teh default is ufs since thats the only portable
optimal types.

Linux gets quite a boost from changing to aufs.
FreeBSD and children get a big boost from changing to diskd.

On Squid-2 COSS is worth a try as a second dir for smaller objects.

> The larger your cache, the larger
> (albeit decreasingly) your hit rate will be. Once you have a large cache,
> you probably want to increase maximum_object_size. If you want to save
> bandwidth "Heap LFUDA" may be the best cache removal policy, as opposed to
> LRU. There might also be some sense in looking at delay pools to better
> prioritise the bandwidth given to individual users.
>
> Optimising squid's caching can be a big complicated job.
>

... but taken step-by-step as an ongoing maintenance process its worth it ;)

Amos
Received on Mon May 11 2009 - 00:13:49 MDT