Re: Proxy Cache/sizing

[Craig Johnson]

In article <marcoba...@no-mx.forums.novell.com>, Marcoba wrote:
> Any suggestions for better caching on these two very busy servers with
> 2000-6000 connections, ~500 fills in progress?
>
The caching you are seeing may be dependent on the maximum hot
unreferenced time (default=30 minutes, Novell recommends upping to 60).
You have to balance that setting against the maximum hot nodes you are
hitting. (You never want to hit that maximum, or the server will really
seem slow). Max hot nodes default=7000 (way to low, Novell recommends
raising to 50,000 and I think the max is 60,000. This is dependent on a
max file lock settings of 100,000, which I have in my tuneup.ncf file in
tip #23 at the URL below).

The cache percent is actually not bad - most of the servers using my
proxy.cfg (tip #63) end up with a cache hit percent in the teens,
because I tell the proxy not to cache sites with cookies. (I've seen
that cause issues with sites that use cookie-based passwords).

You need to balance max hot nodes with max hot unreferenced time, RAM
and sheer speed of disk I/O. The most critical thing I have seen is to
make sure you never hit the max hot nodes. I view the tuning as partly
an exercise for keeping under the maximum. On really busy servers with
fast internet connections I've had to lower the max hot unreferenced
time to have the proxy begin releasing hot nodes earlier so it doesn't
max out.

If you are really busy, you might just consider setting up another proxy
and load-balancing between them.

Craig Johnson
Novell Knowledge Partner
*** For a current patch list, tips, handy files and books on
BorderManager, go to http://www.craigjconsulting.com ***

[Craig Johnson]

In article <marcoba...@no-mx.forums.novell.com>, Marcoba wrote:

> In my log I see we were hitting max values of 48000 for the hot nodes.
> Guess the 66000 settings is save then.
>
If you are up to 48,000, there could be times you hit 66,000, and just
haven't logged that yet?

As far as I know, the max hot nodes you can set is 2/3rds of the max
file locks. The max file locks is 100,000, so try max hot nodes of
66,666, and see if that helps any.

It may be that you just cannot write any faster, but need to.

Lowering the hot unreferenced time might help keep you from hitting the
max hot nodes, or at least delay hitting the upper limit for a bit
longer.