Using SQUID to reduce traffic usage in the office - how effective?
 

Hello.

We are working in the office where about 5-6 machines have Internet access. We pay for each GB of traffic we consume and that's quite expensive. Almost no worker download files. Just surfing websites (including our corporate one that is located outside of local network thus we pay for accessing it too).

I am thinking of purchasing low-end cheap PC to install SQUID and setup NAT to direct all office internet traffic through it.

Should I expect traffic consumption reduce counted by ISP in this case at all? If yes, what is the estimated factor of bandwidth consumtion reduce? I understand, that that depends on what internet sites are the staff surfs etc etc. I just care about something average coming from someone's practice. Increasing SQUID HDD cache to 10-20Gb is not a big problem I think. HDDs are pretty big and cheap nowadays.

Caches pay off from scale, and 5 people each reading their own favourite sites is unlikely to really make much difference, especially with more and more sites being dynamic and preventing caching. It totally depends how your few users work but you might prefer to explore things like browser extensions, like noscript for firefox and other image downloading extensions to stop bandwidth being sucked up.

It's probably more likely to be worth your while using the analysis functions of squid rather than expecting an immediate benefit from caching (although if you do send urls to each other there would be *some* benefit.). y using a tool like squidalyzer you can see what sites / staff are costing you the most and just address it at a personal level. Do you allow youtube? If so cobblers to not downloading files... if they click the high quality videos that'll hammer you. and again IT ignorant / naive users might be watching live tv etc.

I see. Thank you very much. I will think about that.

c.f. http://www.linux.com/feature/153221

Thanks a lot, good article! :)