> how well does squid take advantage of multiple CPUs on a machine? we will be > running squid on a dual cpu ultra2, and i would like to know if i am going to > take full advantage of that machine, or if i would be better off getting it > replaced with a faster single cpu box, or if running multiple squid instances > and load-balancing between them with the .pac file would have to be done.
Squid will only use the one CPU - this comes up all the time in the archives so you should check there first: groups.google.com (use advanced and type in mailing.unix.squid-users for group). That said, I like having squid on my dual CPU ultra 60 because I *imagine* that one cpu is babysitting squid and the other is handling all the OS operations, etc. Squid's main needs/bottlenecks will always be disk and RAM. In general my cpu loads are never over 20% of CPU so if it's a matter of getting another box: get one with more disks and RAM. Though from your previous post, I think you'd have to be pushing a lot of traffic to max out the 3 dedicated 9GB disks you intended to attach to the Ultra2. Hopefully someone else can comment on the .pac setup as we don't do that here but I imagine you could do that. Since I think they'd have to be two completely separate instances of squid with different cache_dir's, I think that including setting put the .pac files, it would be more trouble than it is worth. Given that squid runs on anything, adding another squid box and then doing the same thing would probably be cleaner to maintain. hth Adam
