Re: Squid going unresponsive

mjw@nielsenmedia.com wrote:

> I was grasping at straws and hoping that the continuous crashing and
> restarting of Squid had somehow corrupted the cache, or that there was too
> much load on Squid while it was trying to verify the cache contents. I'm
> not sure if my theory was valid, but it seems to have worked.

There is a problem with Squid 2.x where it can use a lot of memory
unless you periodically rotate your logs. The problem appears when Squid
rebuilds it in-memory index from a dirty cache directory after a
unexpected restart.

Fixes are available from my Squid page
<http://hem.passagen.se/hno/squid/>.

Two workarounds exists:

a) Add a lot of swap, do a foreground rebuild (-F option), and restart
Squid immediately when it has finished rebuilding it's cache.

b) Frequently rotate your logs. This will keep the on-disk index fresh
enough to not cause big problems if you should experience a unexpected
restart.

--
Henrik Nordstrom
Squid hacker