Pfsense 2.1-RC1 squid cache setup recommendation for home network

[miles267]

Was hoping someone might be able to help me determine the optimal squid cache setup for a small home network (10 users max).  System is a Supermicro X7SPA-HF D525 Atom box w/ 4 GB RAM and a 250 GB HDD.  Very lower power box.

It appears each time I install squid, it triggers a constant check_reload_status in activity monitor which causes my CPU to stay at 99% usage.  Even without squid, my pfsense dashboard is showing approx. 50% memory usage.  I've seen it as high as 80% with squid installed.

Thanks in advance for recommendations.

[mromero]

What are your settings?

For starters you may want to be very conservative in sizing the disk space allocated to the Squid Cache.

I have a box with 5 Gigs diskspace / 1 Gig Memory devoted to Squid runs great but its a dual core Pentium.

[miles267]

My pfsense box is installed on a 250 GB HDD with 4 GB RAM on a slower Atom D525.  Runs well, just wasn't sure what the optimal cache settings would be for a home setup.  I've also tried to enter a series of domain names not to be cached such as crashplan.com, livedrive.com and siriusxm,com, etc.

Hard disk cache size: 10000
Hard disk cache system: aufs
Memory cache size; 1024
Min object size: 0
Max object size: 512
Max object size in RAM: 32
Level 1 subdirectories: 64
Memory replacement policy: Heap LFUDA
Cache replacement policy: Heap LFUDA
Low-water-mark in %: 90
High-water-mark in %: 95

Thanks for your guidance!

[kejianshi]

You could probably more than double your Disk cache size if you wanted, although I'm not sure you would see any increase in performance unless you had alot of clients on it.

[miles267]

@kejianshi:

You could probably more than double your Disk cache size if you wanted, although I'm not sure you would see any increase in performance unless you had alot of clients on it.

Are there any guidelines to determining the disk cache?  For example, 10000 MB x # of users?  I'll go ahead and make it 2X now.

[kejianshi]

Well - I only run squid at home here and with a house full of people banging away on keyboards it takes weeks to fill 25000 of disk cache for me.  Assuming the cache isn't stale, that might = better performance, but I'd bet it would make a much bigger difference if a couple hundred people were on it or more.