(sorry if this messes up the threading I just joined the list to respone to this thread)
Firstly, I have been using squid on NetBSD for many years and it works fine for me. I am running squid 3.3.8 on a recent-ish NetBSD-current without issue. I wouldn't totally rule out a problem with squid and NetBSD but there are many many things that can impact the performance of squid which need to be looked at first. As a general note, if you are going to post your squid.conf to a mailing list, please do everyone a favour and do something like: grep -v '^\(#\|[ ]*$\)' /usr/pkg/etc/squid/squid.conf and post that output - this will strip the comments and blank lines leaving a more readable summary of what you actually have in the configuration file (BTW there is a tab and a space between the square brackets above). One thing that can help a lot in working out what is going on with squid is to look in the cache.log file, sometimes slowness and cpu utilisation can be caused by squid restarting which can happen if its child processes (redirector, authenticators, external acl and so on) are exiting, if these processes exit too often/quickly then squid will restart. Similarly, if too many requests waiting to be serviced by the helpers then squid will restart. You should see indications of these restarts and the reasons why in the cache.log. Another thing it may be is squid running out of file descriptors, again, this will be mentioned in the cache.log, try adding: ulimit -n 3000 near the top of /etc/rc.d/squid and restarting squid. This probably should be added to the sample start up script as squid has recently stopped managing the limit itself and now expects a suitable file handle limit. Also, it may be unrealistic expectations - one common problem is that people configure a large disk cache on a memory limited machine. Squid requires around 10 - 14MB or memory per GB of cache you specify simply for managing the cache contents.. it will use more on top of that. So, for example, trying to configure squid with a 100GB cache will result in squid needing more than 1 - 1.4GB of RAM. If you try that on a machine with only 2GB of memory then performance will be poor because the machine will be paging to try and keep up with squid and everything else as well. HTH - if not, please look in the cache.log and post any errors you find, they may provide some clues... also a stripped squid.conf can help. -- Brett Lymn Staple Guns: because duct tape doesn't make that KerCHUNK sound - xkcd.com