Squid - All ntlmauthenticator processes are busy
 

Hi

Just taken over looking after a Slackware box running Squid and Dansguardian as a filter. Currently there are about 1500 worksations on the network with users complaining about slow internet access. After checking the logs for Squid I have noticed that its resetting about every 4 mins with the error message:
2013/10/10 11:43:09| WARNING: All ntlmauthenticator processes are busy.
2013/10/10 11:43:09| WARNING: 60 pending requests queued
2013/10/10 11:43:09| Consider increasing the number of ntlmauthenticator processes in your config file.
2013/10/10 11:43:14| storeDirWriteCleanLogs: Starting...
2013/10/10 11:43:14| Finished. Wrote 0 entries.
2013/10/10 11:43:14| Took 0.00 seconds ( 0.00 entries/sec).
FATAL: Too many queued ntlmauthenticator requests
Squid Cache (Version 3.1.18): Terminated abnormally.

I take it that I need to up the value for children in the config file which is currently at 60.
What would be a safe value to use 100, 500, 1000? I would have thought that increasing this value would take up extra memory (server has 8Gb).
Any help would be fantastic.
Thanks
Ian

Hi Ian,

There wouldnt be a problem to increase the authentication helpers to 100.

Also it would be a good idea to update to the latest stable squid3 release, it would have some performance befenits over 3.1.18