I installed squid-3.0-PRE3-20050111 as a vanilla web proxy. I changed http_port, http_access (allow all), and visible_host from the default configuration. The performance with this setup is extremely poor. I can generally access simple web pages reasonably quickly, but some "complex" web pages, such as cnn.com and zdnet.com front pages take forever to load, 5 minutes or more. Also, images are randomly broken, even on small pages such as the google.com front page and for example on slashdot.org, but not all images, only some.
This happens with the above squid version compiled with no option, but also with the options that the Fedora Core 3 RPMs use: --exec_prefix=/usr \ --bindir=%{_sbindir} \ --libexecdir=%{_libdir}/squid \ --localstatedir=/var \ --sysconfdir=/etc/squid \ --enable-poll \ --enable-snmp \ --enable-removal-policies="heap,lru" \ --enable-storeio="null,ufs" \ --enable-ssl \ --with-openssl=/usr/kerberos \ --enable-delay-pools \ --enable-linux-netfilter \ --with-pthreads \ --enable-ntlm-auth-helpers="SMB,winbind" \ --enable-external-acl-helpers="ip_user,ldap_group,unix_group,wbinfo_group,winbind_group"\ --enable-auth="basic,ntlm" \ --with-winbind-auth-challenge \ --enable-useragent-log \ --enable-referer-log \ --disable-dependency-tracking \ --enable-cachemgr-hostname=localhost \ --disable-ident-lookups \ --enable-truncate \ --enable-underscores \ --datadir=%{_datadir} \ --enable-basic-auth-helpers="LDAP,MSNT,NCSA,PAM,SMB,YP,getpwnam,multi-domain-NTLM,SASL,winbind"\ I even tried increasing all the memory options significantly, to no avail. The machine has plenty of idle memory and CPU. Using the squid version supplied with Fedora Core 3, squid-2.5.STABLE6, using the same configuration changes, I can surf quickly across all sites without errors. Does anyone have an idea what might cause this misbehavior?