Re: minimal VM usage version of Squid

Stewart Forster wrote
>
> > After receiving numerous messages about Squid's hunger for memory,
> > I spent a couple of days hacking up a version which writes immediately
> > to disk. It is probably inefficient to the other extreme--all objects
> > are written to disk. Uncachable objects are promptly removed.
> >
> > This code seems to have a number of bugs still, but if you want
> > to try it out, it can be found at:
> >
> > ftp://squid.nlanr.net/pub/Testing/squid-1.1-novm-src.tar.gz
> >
> > You certainly should not replace your existing squid installations with
> > this one. But I'd be interested to hear from people concerning its
> > perceived performance. And of course any bug fixes would be wonderful.
>
> Pushing everything out to disk will be slower but not by a large amount.
> Using asynch disk I/O will also help heaps there. I've practically finished
> debug/testing asynch I/O here at Connect and it is a large performance win
> although CPU gets chewed doing frequent polling when requests are outstanding
> (roughly 50% - up from 25% using non-async I/O on our boxes).
>
> We found major memory wins by switching malloc libraries. Libc malloc and
> GNU malloc simply cannot cope with squid's memory allocation patterns and do
> a VERY poor job when memory runs low. We gained a factor of 4 performance
> in low memory situations just by changing the malloc library. Unfortunately
> the malloc library we used is not in the public domain...
>

Still, it would be nice to know which commercial version of the
malloc library gives this performance boost. Could you give us some
details?

cheerio Berndt

-- 
Name	: Berndt Josef Wulf
E-Mail	: wulf@ping.net.au
Sysinfo	: DEC AXPpci33+, NetBSD-1.2