🔗 Feature: Cache Directory Failure Bypass

• Goal: Make various cache store directory errors not fatal
• Status: Stalled; patches for Squid2 COSS available, no Squid3 sponsor yet
• ETA: unknown
• Version:
• Developer: AlexRousskov
• More: patches for bug 410

🔗 Details

The following description applies to all supported store types and Squid versions. Current patches implement optional bypass of COSS cache_dir failures for Squid2 only. Please see the patch preamble for technical notes and the bug report for discussion.

Adding bypass=1 option to cache_dir allows Squid to bypass errors related to that cache store. A bypassed cache_dir does not store misses and does not load hits. Its state may be corrupted, requiring a dirty rebuild. However, Squid should keep running, using the remaining cache directories (if any). Once triggered, cache_dir bypass lasts until Squid is stopped. Squid never starts in a bypass mode.

Bypass code considers cache swap state failures as cache_dir failures, even if the swap state file resides outside of cache_dir disk space.

Configuration errors (e.g.,using unsupported store type or wrong cache_dir options for a given store type) are still fatal.

🔗 squid.conf changes

• bypass=1 parameter for cache_dir (required)
• cache_dir_bypass_sample option (optional)
• cache_dir_bypass_errors_min (optional)

🔗 Diagnostics and monitoring

When bypass starts, you will see the following warning in cache.log, along with a possibly relevant error message:

2008/08/29 10:38:14| WARNING: Starting to bypass cache_dir #0
(/var/cache/dir1): stat() system call failed

You can use the cache manager interface to check the status of a cache_dir. For example, mgr:storedir menu will have the following flags for a given cache directory that is both bypassable and is being bypassed (many irrelevant bits snipped):

Store Directory #1 (coss): /var/cache/dir2
...
Flags: BYPASSABLE BYPASSED
...
Bypass stats:
    bypassing: yes
    ops bypassed: 0
    checks: 0 (limit 10)
    errors total: 0 (limit 10)
    errors in a row: 0

You can use the same manager interface to check if a disk is bypassable.

🔗 Other related ideas

Requested by Chris Woodfield

The following sections document ideas remotely related to cache_dir bypass. If you want to work on those features, please start a new Feature page for your work.

🔗 Better handling of disk overflow

Squid should be capable of detecting a disk-full error and purging stale cache objects to free up space. As a secondary goal it should also be possible to shrink the swap.state logs when it becomes either too large or the above mentioned disk-overflow happens.

🔗 Bonus points for cache-size auto-detection

By this I mean auto-detecting the most efficient needed L1/L2 layers without explicit configuration. So squid.conf need only contain:

cache_dir ufs /squid/cache 20GB

Categories: WantedFeature

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