I've tried squid previously only in a lab environment. Over the last 3 months though, I had the chance to try squid in a real environment, in which the TPROXY squid I installed receives around 25000 http requests per minute.
Unfortunately, I've concluded that if someone was to install squid in a real environment, there would be no specific guide that he can follow to avoid all the problems that are waiting for him on the way. A guide about what is the best hardware to choose, the recommended configure options (there is no good documentation for most of them), how to implement a TPROXY using squid, having to tune number of allowed file descriptors on the server, how to handle SYN floods, page faults, poor support of SMP, caching youtube and dynamic contents, good examples of refresh_patterns to start with are just some examples of what I had to run through without having a good guide that would proactively sheds the light on those things. Posting on this list and surfing the web looking for solutions on sometimes obsolete articles and then following the trial and error way of resolving problems were the only things I had. I was able to overcome some of the problems I faced, sometimes on my own and sometimes with the help of kind members on this list. Other problems are still unresolved and have been embarrassing me with the party I have installed this squid for! I'm very disappointed to see my squid malfunctioning and producing logs that I could not find any support for neither online nor on this list just after I tuned max-swap-rate and swap-timeout for my rock stores, which I did trying to fix another problem! After forgetting about using rock stores, I got very disappointed again to see my squid crashing each once in a while just after I removed the old aufs cache_dirs and replaced them with new aufs cache_dirs according to a "more recommended" way. I'm also very disappointed to see squid continuously restarting and core dumping because the swap.state header is inconsistent with the cache contents whenever squid is improperly shutdown! I don't think I have the right to criticize such a big project like squid with its huge lines of code and the huge efforts its developers have exerted on so far. I'm just writing this to express myself and to say that I think versions of squid which are said to be "stable" are far from being really stable, at least for beginners like me. I've always loved open source software and always thought that open source software is much more stable than their closed source counterparts, but unfortunately I did not have the same impression with squid! There must be a problem, or problems, somewhere! It's either weak documentation or perhaps using squid in some environments would require deep insights into the code of squid or maybe a long experience with squid and having to go though many problems and get disappointed many times if you don't have good support! I will give squid a little more time but I think I will give up soon and advise the party I installed squid for to go for another, commercial, cache proxy. Best regards, Firas
