Squid Web Cache wiki

Squid Web Cache documentation

🔗 How Squid uses memory

Squid uses a lot of memory for performance reasons. It takes much, much longer to read something from disk than it does to read directly from memory.

A small amount of metadata for each cached object is kept in memory. This is the StoreEntry data structure. This is 56-bytes on 32-bit architectures and 88-bytes on 64-bit architectures. In addition, there is a 16-byte cache key (MD5 checksum) associated with each StoreEntry. This means there are 72 or 104 bytes of metadata in memory for every object in your cache. A cache with 1,000,000 objects therefore requires 72MB of memory for metadata only. In practice it requires much more than that.

Uses of memory by Squid include:

reason explanation parameter
Disk buffers for reading and writing    
Network I/O buffers read_ahead_gap D
IP Cache contents ipcache_size DNS
FQDN Cache contents fqdncache_size DNS
Netdb ICMP measurement database   N
Per-request state information, including full request and reply headers   D
Miscellaneous statistics collection   D
Index of on-disk cache (metadata, kept in memory) cache_dir I
In-memory cache with “hot objects” cache_mem M+I

Explanation of letters:

D dynamic; more memory is used if more users visit more websites
I 10 MB of memory per 1 GB on disk for 32-bit Squid
14 MB of memory per 1 GB on disk for 64-bit Squid
N Not used often
M rule of thumb: cache_mem is usually one third of the total memory consumption.
On top of the value configured there is also memory used by the index of these objects (see ‘I’)
DNS not recommended to change. Only increase for very large caches or if there is a slow DNS server

There is also memory used indirectly: the Operating System has buffers for TCP connections and file system I/O.

🔗 How can I tell how much memory my Squid process is using?

One way is to simply look at ps output on your system. For BSD-ish systems, you probably want to use the -u option and look at the VSZ and RSS fields:

wessels ~ 236% ps -axuhm
USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS     TT  STAT STARTED       TIME COMMAND
squid     9631  4.6 26.4 141204 137852  ??  S    10:13PM   78:22.80 squid -NCYs

For SYSV-ish, you probably want to use the -l option. When interpreting the ps output, be sure to check your ps manual page. It may not be obvious if the reported numbers are kbytes, or pages (usually 4 kb).

A nicer way to check the memory usage is with a program called top:

last pid: 20128;  load averages:  0.06,  0.12,  0.11                   14:10:58
46 processes:  1 running, 45 sleeping
CPU states:     % user,     % nice,     % system,     % interrupt,     % idle
Mem: 187M Active, 1884K Inact, 45M Wired, 268M Cache, 8351K Buf, 1296K Free
Swap: 1024M Total, 256K Used, 1024M Free

  PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
 9631 squid     2   0   138M   135M select  78:45  3.93%  3.93% squid

Finally, you can ask the Squid process to report its own memory usage. This is available on the Cache Manager info page. Your output may vary depending upon your operating system and Squid version, but it looks similar to this:

Resource usage for squid:
Maximum Resident Size: 137892 KB
Memory usage for squid via mstats():
Total space in arena:  140144 KB
Total free:              8153 KB 6%

If your RSS (Resident Set Size) value is much lower than your process size, then your cache performance is most likely suffering due to Paging. See also CacheManager

🔗 Why does Squid use so much cache memory?

It can appear that a machine running Squid is using a huge amount of memory “cached Mem”

 KiB Mem:   4037016 total,  3729152 used,   307864 free,   120508 buffers
 KiB Swap:  8511484 total,        0 used,  8511484 free.  2213580 cached Mem

This is normal behaviour in Linux - everything that’s once read from disk is cached in RAM, as long as there is free memory. If the RAM is needed in another way, the cache in memory will be reduced. See also https://www.linuxatemyram.com/

Machines running Squid can show unusual amounts of this disk I/O caching happening because Squid caches contain a lot of files and access them randomly.

🔗 My Squid process grows without bounds.

You might just have your cache_mem parameter set too high. See What can I do to reduce Squid’s memory usage? below.

When a process continually grows in size, without levelling off or slowing down, it often indicates a memory leak. A memory leak is when some chunk of memory is used, but not free’d when it is done being used.

Memory leaks are a real problem for programs (like Squid) which do all of their processing within a single process. Historically, Squid has had real memory leak problems. But as the software has matured, we believe almost all of Squid’s memory leaks have been eliminated, and new ones are least easy to identify.

Memory leaks may also be present in your system’s libraries, such as libc.a or even libmalloc.a. If you experience the ever-growing process size phenomenon, we suggest you first try alternate-malloc.

🔗 I set cache_mem to XX, but the process grows beyond that!

The cache_mem parameter does NOT specify the maximum size of the process. It only specifies how much memory to use for caching “hot” (very popular) replies. Squid’s actual memory usage is depends very strongly on your cache_dir sizes (disk space) and your incoming request load. Reducing cache_mem will usually also reduce the process size, but not necessarily, and there are other ways to reduce Squid’s memory usage (see below )

See also How much memory do I need in my Squid server?.

🔗 The “Total memory accounted” value is less than the size of my Squid process.

We are not able to account for all memory that Squid uses. This would require excessive amounts of code to keep track of every last byte. We do our best to account for the major uses of memory.

Also, note that the malloc and free functions have their own overhead. Some additional memory is required to keep track of which chunks are in use, and which are free. Additionally, most operating systems do not allow processes to shrink in size. When a process gives up memory by calling free, the total process size does not shrink. So the process size really represents the maximum size your Squid process has reached.

🔗 xmalloc: Unable to allocate 4096 bytes!

by HenrikNordström

Messages like “FATAL: xcalloc: Unable to allocate 4096 blocks of 1 bytes!” appear when Squid can’t allocate more memory, and on most operating systems (inclusive BSD) there are only two possible reasons:

The first case is detected using the normal swap monitoring tools available on the platform (pstat on SunOS, perhaps pstat is used on BSD as well).

To tell if it is the second case, first rule out the first case and then monitor the size of the Squid process. If it dies at a certain size with plenty of swap left then the max data segment size is reached without no doubts.

The data segment size can be limited by two factors:

When squid starts it sets data and file ulimit’s to the hard level. If you manually tune ulimit before starting Squid make sure that you set the hard limit and not only the soft limit (the default operation of ulimit is to only change the soft limit). root is allowed to raise the soft limit above the hard limit.

This command prints the hard limits:

ulimit -aH

This command sets the data size to unlimited:

ulimit -HSd unlimited

BSD/OS

by Arjan de Vet

The default kernel limit on BSD/OS for datasize is 64MB (at least on 3.0 which I’m using).

Recompile a kernel with larger datasize settings:

maxusers        128
# Support for large inpcb hash tables, e.g. busy WEB servers.
options         INET_SERVER
# support for large routing tables, e.g. gated with full Internet routing:
options         "KMEMSIZE=\(16*1024*1024\)"
options         "DFLDSIZ=\(128*1024*1024\)"
options         "DFLSSIZ=\(8*1024*1024\)"
options         "SOMAXCONN=128"
options         "MAXDSIZ=\(256*1024*1024\)"

See /usr/share/doc/bsdi/config.n for more info.

In /etc/login.conf I have this:

default:\
        :path=/bin /usr/bin /usr/contrib/bin:\
        :datasize-cur=256M:\
        :openfiles-cur=1024:\
        :openfiles-max=1024:\
        :maxproc-cur=1024:\
        :stacksize-cur=64M:\
        :radius-challenge-styles=activ,crypto,skey,snk,token:\
        :tc=auth-bsdi-defaults:\
        :tc=auth-ftp-bsdi-defaults:

#
# Settings used by /etc/rc and root
# This must be set properly for daemons started as root by inetd as well.
# Be sure reset these values back to system defaults in the default class!
#
daemon:\
        :path=/bin /usr/bin /sbin /usr/sbin:\
        :widepasswords:\
        :tc=default:
#       :datasize-cur=128M:\
#       :openfiles-cur=256:\
#       :maxproc-cur=256:\

This should give enough space for a 256MB squid process.

FreeBSD (2.2.X)

by Duane Wessels

The procedure is almost identical to that for BSD/OS above. Increase the open filedescriptor limit in /sys/conf/param.c:

int     maxfiles = 4096;
int     maxfilesperproc = 1024;

Increase the maximum and default data segment size in your kernel config file, e.g. /sys/conf/i386/CONFIG:

options         "MAXDSIZ=(512*1024*1024)"
options         "DFLDSIZ=(128*1024*1024)"

We also found it necessary to increase the number of mbuf clusters:

options         "NMBCLUSTERS=10240"

And, if you have more than 256 MB of physical memory, you probably have to disable BOUNCE_BUFFERS (whatever that is), so comment out this line:

#options        BOUNCE_BUFFERS          #include support for DMA bounce buffers

Also, update limits in /etc/login.conf:

# Settings used by /etc/rc
#
daemon:\
        :coredumpsize=infinity:\
        :datasize=infinity:\
        :maxproc=256:\
        :maxproc-cur@:\
        :memoryuse-cur=64M:\
        :memorylocked-cur=64M:\
        :openfiles=4096:\
        :openfiles-cur@:\
        :stacksize=64M:\
        :tc=default:

And don’t forget to run “cap_mkdb /etc/login.conf” after editing that file.

🔗 What can I do to reduce Squid’s memory usage?

If your cache performance is suffering because of memory limitations, you might consider buying more memory. But if that is not an option, There are a number of things to try:

🔗 Using an alternate malloc library

Many users have found improved performance and memory utilization when linking Squid with an external malloc library. We recommend either GNU malloc, or dlmalloc.

🔗 GNU malloc

To make Squid use GNU malloc follow these simple steps:

As Squid’s configure script runs, watch its output. You should find that it locates libgnumalloc.a and optionally gnumalloc.h.

🔗 How much memory do I need in my Squid server?

As a rule of thumb on Squid uses approximately 10 MB of RAM per GB of the total of all cache_dirs (more on 64 bit servers such as Alpha), plus your cache_mem setting and about an additional 10-20MB. It is recommended to have at least twice this amount of physical RAM available on your Squid server. For a more detailed discussion on Squid’s memory usage see the sections above.

The recommended extra RAM besides what is used by Squid is used by the operating system to improve disk I/O performance and by other applications or services running on the server. This will be true even of a server which runs Squid as the only tcp service, since there is a minimum level of memory needed for process management, logging, and other OS level routines.

If you have a low memory server, and a large disk, then you will not necessarily be able to use all the disk space, since as the cache fills the memory available will be insufficient, forcing Squid to swap out memory and affecting performance. A very large cache_dir total and insufficient physical RAM + Swap could cause Squid to stop functioning completely. The solution for larger caches is to get more physical RAM; allocating more to Squid via cache_mem will not help.

🔗 Why can’t my Squid process grow beyond a certain size?

by Adrian Chadd

A number of people are running Squid with more than a gigabyte of memory. Here are some things to keep in mind.

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