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nelson6069
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Squid for caching file hardware requirement?

Mon Jan 27, 2014 12:15 pm

I want to install squid for caching my network clients files, my network have around 450 clients and all of them are students.
May i know which is more important for squid hardware requirement that will affect performance?
Processor?
RAM should be big?
HDD should be big size and faster?

For my current planning, 16GB RAM, 2TB seagate Hybrid drives.

Which processor should i use? E3 or E5?

Does squid use a lot of CPU source? or RAM and HDD are the important hardware?
 
reinerotto
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Re: Squid for caching file hardware requirement?

Wed Jan 29, 2014 12:54 pm

16GB: More is better. Squid stores some info about every cached object in memory. The more RAM available, the more objects squid can handle efficiently. However, there is a max no of objects squid can manage for one cache directory, it uses. Independent upon size of objects. Which then determines the usable size of the disk(s).
Not to go too far into details now, better use 64GB RAM, and one or two 1TB disks instead of one 2TB. Because of max number of cached objects, 2TB might never be used. Multiple disks give better performance, because of parallel activities. The more disk space for cache, the higher the hit rate, but this will level out, depending upon the users: When squid caches max number of videos, this will need much more disk space compared to caching max no of 32kb objects.
Use "aufs" as filesystem for squid.

As the latest squid has a lot of "knobs" and "switches", I would suggest you to start with very last squid2.7. Rock solid for production use.
Main disadvantages: No rock_store (fast for small objects) and no support for MP. But rock_store looks like not to be absolutely stable, and MP-squid might not really be necessary in case you have dedicated squid machine anyway. And: In case, you find out, squid2.7 being really CPU-bound, you can run multiple instances of squid2.7, in a semi-MP mode. For this, you should have 4 cores, minimum.
In case you want to start with 3.4.x-squid: Do not start using MP, no rock, but aufs. Keep it simple for the beginning.

So, in short words: 64GB, 4 cores, (2x) 1TB disk.
 
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Re: Squid for caching file hardware requirement?

Fri Jan 31, 2014 9:22 pm

Two words: Memory & Disk
CPU or MP have its importance in its own domain, but IMHO memory and disks priority comes above. as nowa days Multi core cpu is very common.

More Memory, Better performance. (I have even seen squid eating 288GB of box maxing out on full load :D)
More disk Spindles you have, more read/write speed you will get in load conditions. (Usually Raid10 gives good performance at the cost of higher disk wastage :P)

SQUID 2.7 is good as I have deployed lot of installation in mini isp's , it also supports URL rewrite helper feature like storeurl.pl which supports doing caching of famous websites like YouTube , and lot of others which helps in reducing bandwidth usage in busy networks.

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