Is squid unable to handle the load?

Maybe someone can help us with this one...

We're an ISP. For few months now were are trying to configure our Squid to
cache transparently traffic from our terminal servers in order to improve
web access of our clients. Everything is configured and works properly,
however Squid machine is unable to handle the load and slows-down after
running for few hours with terminal server traffic redirected into proxy
machine. What we have to do is remove the redirection, restart squid and
then it will work fine for a while, and slow-down again.

Here is more detailed information:

Squid machine:
Pentium II 300Mhz, 384MB Ram, 24GB UltraWide SCSII HDD
BSDI 3.1, Squid 1.1.21, I, IPFilter 3.2.7

Cisco 3600 router

The way we test is, we are redirecting traffic on port 80 from only 4
terminal servers (PM3's) - one full class C - via Cisco 3600 to Squid
machine. Then on Squid, IPFilter redirects port 80 to 8080 which is Squid's
port.

With this configuration maximum of 192 clients can request web pages
through squid at the same time. As I said before, this works excellent at
the beginning with a high Hit ratio, and then after few hours starts
slowing down and finally after 8-10 hours it takes forever to request
anything via squid.

At the time this happens vmstat reports 110MB ram available. We are using
GNU Malloc.

Does anybody have any ideas????????

Mark Dabrowski
mark@ica.net

+------------------------------------------<<<
+ Mark Dabrowski @ Canada On-Line @ Toronto, Ontario
+ Tel: (905) 624-8566 ext.5067, Fax: (905) 624-5397, mark@ica.net
+ For technical inquires please email support@ica.net or call our
+ Technical Support Department at (905) 624-1953.
+------------------------------------------------------------------>>>
Received on Tue May 26 1998 - 08:23:46 MDT