On 5/18/06, Nathan Bell <nathanb@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Top download speed is the same for both linux and windows boxes, but overall browsing is significantly slower on the windows boxes. At first I thought the problem was with the windows boxes not receiving the dns information quickly, but tests have shown otherwise.
I assume this is a non-transparent proxy? How are you configuring the proxy settings on the clients? What browsers are used? Are different browsers (Firefox vs IE vs Opera) from the same workstation equally slow? When I configure Windows clients for non-transparent authentication, I set them up with a PAC script so they don't perform DNS lookups unless they are going to an intranet destination. This improves performance and reliability -- how much depends on how bad your DNS servers are. (The one place we cannot use PAC is on Mac.)
Is there a performance penalty for having pc_hosts that don't authenticate along side unix_hosts that do? Is squid trying to access a non-existant ident server on the windows stations?
I believe so, but this is one area where my skills are rusty. A sniffer capture would show you what is really going on in the inside of the network. Can you provide more details on the browser configuration? There are tunables in Firefox for how clients make connections through the browser, these can make a significant difference to performance. Kevin
