Squid slowing youtube video (solved I think)?

XIII

at the bottom of the havp proxy settings page there is this option:

Scan media stream
Check this for scan media (audio/video) stream. Use this for additional scan exploits for players.

if this is checked it will download the stream to pfsense, scan it using havp, then forward it to the requesting device.

stephenw10

Do you get throttling on other sites, viddler, dailymotion etc?
If so then it's a problem with streaming flash rather than youtube. It seems that youtube changed it's policy to allow local caching of video a while back where as other sites may not.

You may have to create a rule to stop squid caching flash/video.

Steve

kropbj

No. Other video sites don't seem to be affected. Downloads beautifully at full connection speed.

Am I correct in assuming that "VideoCache" for squid would not help in this situation?

mhab12

What version of the squid package are you using? I used to see similar problems, but for whatever reason they seem to be resolved in the most recent package.

kropbj

I removed squidguard to see if that would have any effect and nothing changed.
Then removed squid (ver. 2.7.9_4) and everything work nice and fast with youtube.
Installed squid3 alpha for the heck of it and youtube works nice and quick. But it seems as though squidguard
doesn't play nice with squid3.

kropbj

I even went so far as to reinstall pfSense on this box.
Does anyone else experience poor YouTube performance like this?
If not, maybe it's some kind of hardware glitch.

stephenw10

Just to be straight you have:
A fresh install of pfsense 1.2.3 release.
Squid package installed.
Bandwidth throttling on Youtube only.

You may be able to prevent caching of youtube. E.g. http://www.comfsm.fm/computing/squid/FAQ-7.html#ss7.8

However youtube uses a number of domains to stream from so you may want to prevent caching of flash video instead.

I'm no expert on this though! Maybe?


acl NOCACHE rep_mime_type -i video/flv
no_cache deny NOCACHE

kropbj

I tried reinstalling pfSense again and configuring the bare minimum. Only package installed is squid.
I even disabled the onboard VIA Rhine ethernet and install a new Intel gigabit card thinking that might do it.

I also tried modifying the squid.conf to include the no_cache code;

acl NOCACHE rep_mime_type -i video/flv
no_cache deny NOCACHE

Made no difference.

kropbj

I'm not sure if this would be a bug of some sort but I believe that I've fix this issue.
I ended up playing with the "Hard disk cache system". I initially changed it to null and rebooted to see if that would change anything.
Loaded a 720p YouTube video no hiccups and full 7Mbit speed. Then I figured I'd change it back to ufs and rebooted again.
Now the YouTube video should be stalling right? Cause this is what it was set at originally.
But It's still working without hiccup or any sort of throttling.

stephenw10

Hmm odd, sounds like something hasn't changed. Did you try several videos to make sure it's not cached on your local machine?
I'm pretty sure the no_cache option is the way to go but like I said I'm no expert and I pretty much just pulled that code out of the air! You need someone more experienced to point out why it made no difference. (probably some syntax problem).

Steve