I have this authentication script on my setup: auth_param basic program /usr/bin/python /etc/auth.py auth_param basic children 5 startup=5 idle=1 auth_param basic realm Please login auth_param basic credentialsttl 1 hours Quite frequently I check with a cron for changes in my user's data (passwords etc) and I issue a squid3 -k reconfigure whenever I detect a change. The problem is that each time I issue this command squid spanws 5 new authentication listeners (/usr/bin/python /etc/auth.py) and it quickly adds up to thousands given the amount of activity we have on our servers. Any ideas on how I can do this better?