Squid Overwhelmed With Traffic
 

Hi everyone,

Av setup and using squid as a transparent proxy and pushing through it an average traffic of 6Meg of traffic from about 600 Computers to the internet all through the day.

With this load of traffic squid is freezing after small intervals of time mainly between 45 Mins to 1 Hour - squid basically cant relay requests back to the clients at this times though from the logs one can see it receiving requests.Meaning no-access to the internet during this.
The dell computer am using for the server cannot take more than 2Gig of RAM and am forced to stick with 2Gig which I think can be the other problem.

To deal with this I have set cron jobs to restart squid after every hour which is working fine but giving me issues coz of the many disconnections I have to - connection critical applications - during the many squid restarts.

Has anyone ever come across the same problem and how can I sort this best?Is there a way I can prioritize/maximize memory resources to squid?Currently I have stopped enough services in the server only a few services running and of cos squid.
The server is only serving as cache server.

Thanks in advance!

When the freeze occurs, what does the CPU usage look like? Memory usage? Hard disk activity? Care to show us what your current configuration looks like (only the lines relevant to cache storage)? Perhaps some cache tweaking is in order.

Thanks win32sux,
Apologies I couldn't respond earlier,
Basically Memory seems to be the issue here coz whenever squid freezes,theres normally about 8MB to 16MB(sometimes even less!)free out of the 2Gig on the server.Most of it used by squid.

Am wondering if there could be a better way to relieve memory without necessarily restarting squid considering the many disconnections I have to go through.
Advice generously.

Thanks again.

Please post the output of:And also:Please go ahead and post your cache configuration so we can see if improvements could be made to the memory usage setup. You don't need to restart Squid when you make those sort of changes - you just pass the reconfigure option on the command line.

PS: Please also post the output of:That way we can make sure the versions you have doesn't suffer from a memory leak or something like that. It will also tell us what options your Squid has been compiled with. Did you compile it yourself or is it a distro-provided package?

Apologies win32sux for not replying earlier -

I have been away for a while on some assignment and didn't well manage to get in touch with you and follow up on this.
Actually the Squid Server was put aside while I was away,pending solution.I will most definitely get in touch when need be.Av truly appreciated your support and advice.

Thanks again all.