Squid takes so much bandwidth ?

Hi,

I have Squid2 installed as a transparent proxy for my 256 Kbit/s
Internet connection and since I installed the proxy server I felt a
decrease in the surfing speed for sites that are not cached in the proxy
(sites that are cached come very fast). I'm using Cisco as my router
(AS5260) and it's also one of my access servers. When I disconnected the
proxy server from the hub (and disabled the IP policy in the router, of
course) I checked the graphs of the incoming data from my internet
connection (via MRTG) and I saw it go down from about 200kbit/s to
40-50kbit/s(!).

This thing confirmed the fact that my squid box is stealing bandwidth..
This box is P-200 w/256 MB RAM and two UW SCSI HDs (total of 13 GB).
Squid 2 runs on FreeBSD release 3 with only squid running in the
background.

Please let me know if there is anything I can do to minimize the
bandwidth that squid takes (and increase the speed because of that). I
don't know squid very well, but I thought maybe it is set up to check if
web pages got updated even if they are not requested and that's what
taking my bandwidth ?

Any help will be very appreciated..

Thanks in advance,
Eyal Moshe,
InfoMall Ltd.
Received on Sat Dec 12 1998 - 15:36:22 MST