Squid process sizes growing

Hi everyone.

About squid processes growing wildly:

I would guess that I am right in all below, if not, flame me :)

Ok - people are wondering why their squid programs are growing huge,
and hopefully this will give them some help:

When squid runs, it reads the config file and is told: Use (for example)
12 megs of ram.

The problem is as follows: When someone downloads a copy of
Quake, coming in at about 12 megs, squid HAS to allocate memory for it.
There are no temporary files that it can store it to, and this would certainly
involve more filehandles too. So, anyway, it allocates the ram.

Now, I have seen the following being downloaded through our cache:
2*Internet Explorer (2* about ?4 megs?)
1*quake (12 megs)
1*Netscape (SGI Version) (3 megs?)
1*racing game (12 megs)
1*Microsoft techCD update (15 megs -if my memory serves me right)
Plus the normal hits...

So I had no reason to complain if it was using more ram than I had told
it to.

The REAL problem is as follows. Some **** operating systems handle ram
REALLY badly. When squid requests 1 Meg, and then de-allocates it, the
OS doesn't take the ram back... It can end up only taking about 1/3
back.
That is the case where you need to upgrade your malloc library...

There is a fairly generic problem with unixes in that memory allocation
doesn't work as it should... Your process can only grow in size as it
will allocate 1 meg of ram, de-allocate it and the size that shows
up in "ps" never gets smaller.

Oskar
Received on Sun Oct 27 1996 - 02:01:20 MST