I am running STABLE10 on an old Firewall/Gateway system (Compaq P3 550Mhz) and just recently have noticed some poor performance now that the cache has reached its allowable limits. When bring new files into cache, the system struggles and becomes seriously IO bound before returning the objects to the browser. I suspect that squid is trying to find the oldest files in the cache to drop before bringing in the new data. The outcome is that the surfer sees abysmal performance as this process appears to proceed serially. I also expect the cache is designed to facilitate lookup and less so to trash out of date files. Is this expected behaviour or are there param tweaks I could use to get the jump on this by clearing cache ahead of time when the system is "idle"? Cheers, Frank.
