P4 16Ghz 512MB RAM 40GB 7200rpm ATA-100 IDE Hard Disk 100Mbit switched LAN connection
As mentioned, your Internet speed will be the real bottleneck here. I'd see no reason why something lower spec than above would easily provide a benefit to the 'feel' of Internet speed. It also depends on the style of browsing done by your LAN users. If they all visit the same websites/pages then things will definetly feel faster. If users have widely differing browsing habits then things may not improve too much as the majority of web content may end up not being served from the cache as no-one has looked at it before. Our school tends to reach up to 55-60% of hits being served from the cache but as a school we have fairly common browsing between users as students often visit pages as suggested by Teachers.
You may also benefit by running a local DNS server, so DNS lookups can be performed 'on-LAN' as opposed to being performed by an Internet/ISP based DNS server. Check out BIND on Linux for this. It's not too hard to configure.
Final comment is that on a 256kbit line, Squid is unlikely to end up being a bottleneck even on a very low powered server. Many commercial companies that provide Squid based caches use things as basic as AMD K6-2 450Mhz CPUs!
Hope this is of use,
Regards,
nry
Thanks Serassio and Adam for your feedback. I look briefly at Samba 3.0 and it looks like it will do the job for me. I need to read a little more about it to be able to configure it.
As Serassio pointed out WAN bandwidth would be my bottleneck. I'm painfully aware of this fact: but unfortunately bandwidth isn't readily available and the little available is quite expensive in where this LAN is.
Any recommendation on what hardware can comfortably handle 30-50 clients? As
you can see I'm counting on Squid to solve a little of my bandwidth problem.
I wouldn't want Squid to become the bottleneck instead so I don't mind
investing in a slightly higher performance hardware for Squid if that would
help.
Thanks again for your response.
-----Original Message----- From: Serassio Guido [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2003 2:47 AM To: Cafe Admin; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [squid-users] Squid NT vs. Squid Linux
Hi,
At 04.33 15/11/2003, Cafe Admin wrote:
>Hi All,
>Does any one know if there is any noticeable peformance difference between
>Squid on Windows 2000 Server and on RedHat Linux 9? I'm currently running
>2.5-Stable3 on a dedicated RH9 box, and I know my hardware is being
>underutlized (2.0GHz Xeon , 2x10k RPM SCSI, 640MB, 1000Mbps NIC). I'm
>thinking about converting the machine to Windows File Server/PDC/SquidNT.
>Serving 30 clients on 100MB network (who are constantly surfing the Net)
>with 256Kbps connection to the Internet. As always thanks for your
feedback.
In the Windows port there are still some limitations:
- Max. 2048 File Descriptors, so more than 100 concurrent client cannot be safely supported - The internal socket loop is select() based vs poll() or better on Unix/Linux - Transparent proxy is not available - Some async FS storage are not available (COSS, diskd)
So currently I expect always better performance from a Linux/Unix based Squid.
In Your configuration I think that major bottleneck can be the line speed: today an Internet bandwidth of 256 Kbit/s for 30 concurrent web client can be very low.
Regards
Guido
- ======================================================== Guido Serassio Acme Consulting S.r.l. Via Gorizia, 69 10136 - Torino - ITALY Tel. : +39.011.3249426 Fax. : +39.011.3293665 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] WWW: http://www.acmeconsulting.it/
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