Ho Rex On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 2:46 PM, rex_ray . <rex_ray@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi, > We are a Public University offering free internet access (both > wired/wireless) to students through three Squid Proxy Servers.The > number of peak time users even reach more than 3000. To my knowledge > these proxies are running without any optimization. Also Proxy users > are always complaining about the slow speed of the net. I inherited > this setup from my predecessor a week ago,though am a linux > administrator am new to the world of Squid Web Proxy. I have the > following questions regarding Squid. > > Is it really necessary to run three proxy servers to support more > than 3500 users? Unfortunately the number of users is not a relevant unit to measure load to a proxy, as the actual load depends a lot on the users' behavior. In addition to the OS it runs on, squid offers a wide number of diagnostic tools to help understand how it is behaving. Among them, the Cache Manager (http://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/CacheManager), a built-in SNMP agent (http://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/Snmp), a customizable log (http://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/LogFormat) which includes in its default format the time taken for each transaction to be analyzed by third-party or custom statistics software. > Am asking this question because now users have to configure either > one of the three proxy addresses in their browsers(a real hassle) if > they want to browse. I was hoping if it is just a single proxy we can > use the "WPAD" script to auto-detect the proxy address in the browser. There are a number of techniques you can use to load-balance among caches: WPAD (http://wiki.squid-cache.org/Technology/WPAD) is not limited to single-cache scenarios. In addition you can use DNS-based load balancing or an external NAT-based load balancer such as Linux Virtual Server. > If a single server can support more than 3500 users then what kind > of specs it should have? (i.e Processor, RAM, HDD Space, RAID level > etc) See my previous remark about number users being a meaningless indicator of performance. > Also I need advice from the Pros who run setups with this much number > of users. Advance thanks for your replies. I guess that the first step is collecting some more relevant data: some info can be found on http://wiki.squid-cache.org/KnowledgeBase/PerformanceAnalysis and http://wiki.squid-cache.org/PerformanceMeasure Thanks -- /kinkie
