Hi
> I was about to purchase a new box for squid (my old 2Gb, P90 has served me
> well for a year running squid 1.somthing). I spec-ed out a Dell 2300
> with 512Mb, 6x9Gb + RAID-0 (Dell PERC-RAID is really AMI MegaRaid which is
> supported in 2.0.36 linux kernels (and Redhat 5.2)).
If I was going to use lots of disks I would go raid-4 or raid-5... not
raid-0.
I would only use hardware-raid if I was to use the reliability features...
otherwise I would simply use two filesystems (or even software md-raid).
> o For a reasonably well used cache, is using multiple cache_dir entries and
> efficient as a hardare RAID-0 box? (Yes I know there will be some
> small performance loss, but will squid make use of all the disks
> efficiently?)
It will probably be as efficient. Squid balances between multiple disks.
using round-robin to write different requests to different disks.
> o Another thread asked the question if a disk (and thus a cache_dir) went
> bad would squid continue to perform well using the remaining disks ?
> Is this true?
No.... or it depends.
If your kernel code crashes because the ext2 filesystem goes bad, then no.
If your kernel survives, you may get:
Corrupted objects
0-length returned objects (because Squid cannot open files, cannot read
from them or something similar)
Wrong objects returned.
> o Whats the maximum limits on Squid? Should I continue to throw disk at a
> box, or buy a separate box. If I can save on RAID, I can afford extra
> memory and so have a 1Gb RAM box - Squid won't break?
There are pages out there that give 'squid sizing' on various platforms. I
suggest that you have a look around.
Remember - if you compile Squid-2* with async-io (./configure
--enable-async-io) then you will be able to exceed performance compared to
the same hardware running 1.0 and 1.1.
> o Is it the general consensus to avoid Transparent proxying if possible, and
> that it is better to force the user to knowingly use the proxy settings in
> their browser?
Be careful. Make sure that all managers/customers/etc know before hand.
You could have problems with people that need direct access (think about
people using IP address authentication).
I would use transparency here: we have too large a user base for all people
to request help changing their settings. If we were to do it, though, we
would do it very, very, very carefully.
Oskar
