UNOFFICIAL GUIDE: Activating Multiple Squid Workers for increased non-disk throughput

JonathanLee

Hello fellow Netgate community members, I wanted to share this with you and other advanced Squid users as you know the Squid package security updates completed upstream, So I wanted to share this for future use.

Squid does have an ability to run multiple workers. Again, to do this with disk caching you can only do this with use of cache_dir rock. pfSense does not support use of rock disk caching yet. There is a work around and most users do not use disk caching so simply set it to null (see below). So, you can run multiple workers on pfSense when disk caching is disabled.

Another change you must do is add a system tunable.

After you make this change the failure errors will stop.
Next add an advanced configuration option in squid. (see below for why this is need)

workers 3

you must reboot the Squid system after not a refresh a full restart.

Number of main Squid processes or "workers" to fork and maintain.
	0: "no daemon" mode, like running "squid -N ..."
	1: "no SMP" mode, start one main Squid process daemon (default)
	N: start N main Squid process daemons (i.e., SMP mode)

	In SMP mode, each worker does nearly all what a single Squid daemon
	does (e.g., listen on http_port and forward HTTP requests).

Squid can run multiple workers if you have disk cache disabled or set to null. It really speeds up SSL_BUMP traffic and proxy traffic a lot. This is the work around for the package lacking support for rock cache.

Please let me know if you see anything wrong here.

Ref:
http://www.squid-cache.org/Doc/config/workers/
https://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/SmpScale
https://wiki.squid-cache.org/ConfigExamples/SmpCarpCluster