Getting the Maximum from Squid?
 

Hi as i live in New Zealand we have S**t internet i only get 30GB/Month and this is a stress to keep under the limit every month because the internet doesn't stop when you have hit the limit. I am wondering if anyone can give me some tips to get the most out of squid to save bandwidth usage. I don't care about how much disk space it would use (kind of) i have 100GB of disk space hanging around that can be used. On top of this im working on a program that login's into my ISP's Usage Monitor Website and get's usage and will stop the internet if close to limit. But getting the most from squid would be the first step if anyone can give me some ideas on how to configure squid to save more bandwidth. Current i get 1% Hit, 99% Miss which is ok.... but i would like to get more.

Thanks
Dean

The best way to use Squid to reduce overall bandwidth usage is to cluster it with a lot of friends. If you all run Squid and allow your Squid to share with their squid, you should get better results.

Do you mean allow friends access to the proxy? cause that would use alot of extra bandwidth and slow down the internet. I thought there would be ways to tweak the configuration so squid caches more data?

I believe that squid is designed to cluster; multiple instances of squid, but exchanging their cache data. I am not an expert but the idea behind the cluster is to make available pages that you and your friends have recently accessed, so that if you and they go to the same web sites you can work off the squid cache rather than go to the site.
The issue for you is the traffic between the multiple instances of squid versus just going to the site. I have no idea what the difference would be, but assume that the speed increase means there is less bandwidth in use.

Try this and bear in mind its comment about DNS.