Squid problem with Akamai servers?

[Brett Glass <squid-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Everyone:

Just today, I noticed that a transparent Squid proxy running on 
FreeBSD 4.11 was really bogging down its Internet connection. So, I 
ran the "netstat" command, and discovered that the cache had huge 
numbers of open sockets (more than 100) to Port 80 on the Akamai 
server at our upstream provider. Any client sockets (that is, 
sockets from the clients to the proxy) that might have been 
associated with the transactions had all closed, but the sockets 
from the proxy to the Akamai server were in the "ESTABLISHED" 
state. The send queues on the sockets all seemed to contain about 
50K bytes of data and were VERY slowly getting smaller.

What's the likely cause of this? And why are all of the perpetually 
open sockets all to Akamai servers? Is anyone else out there seeing 
this behavior? I'm worried that there is some sort of adverse 
interaction going on between Squid and Akamai.

--Brett Glass