I’ve 20 clients sharing a 8M adsl connection. I’ve been using dansguardian and squid on a server with 2Gb memory and what seems to be a decent hard disk. /var is on a separate partition. The server also does nfs for 100 users’ /home folders, is a router, mysql, nis, apache, ftp server and firewall. It’s a real low budget affair with PII clients with 256M memory. It’s a school lan so we are normally all looking at the same sites.
The internet works but it slows down depending upon how many clients are connected, the more the slower. I switched over to tinyproxy but that’s worse even with only a few clients connected.
My question is: Say I have 3 hours to spend on this. Do I 1. Try other proxies? 2. Read about squid.conf? 3. WHY
Do some measurements to see where the bottlenecks are on your system.
But to some extent this is to be expected, especially with a content-filtering system like Dansguardian. It really does need a fair bit of grunt to do content-filtering as opposed to URL filtering.
Thanks for the reply. I never thought it could be dansguardian. With that turned off everything goes faster. I just realised also that tiny proxy doesn’t cache. I suppose my question now is what alternatives do I have to dansguardian?
Well there’s squidguard, which is a URL banning system so takes less resources to run. But it relies on blacklists being up to date as opposed to looking for naughty words in the pages. Some sites even use both filters.