[plug] Fast net access via Linux server question

[John Summerfield]

> Old Firestation Backpacker wrote:
> > 
> > Greg Mildenhall wrote:
> > > On Tue, 8 Feb 2000, Old Firestation Backpacker [aka Leon] wrote:
> > >> 56K should be enough with Squid or a similar proxy on the Linux box
> > >> (spec it for >=64K of RAM, recommend 128K)
> > 
> > > I think you'll need more RAM than that, unless it's a _really_ old
> > > firestation in your backpack.
> > 
> > 128M is plenty here, even with the same machine being used as a browser
> > client (K6-II-400, uses 2xbonded 56K modems, 12 browser screens, one of
> > which is often me)
> 
> I have a small squid cache running off a machine with 40MB and the
> machine is doing a lot of other things as well.  You *can* get away
> without using up too much memory for squid since all it really needs is
> to hold the hot and in-transit objects which, on all but the busiest
> caches, don't really need all that much memory at all.  Of course the
> more memory the better and performance goes down the drain if you don't
> have enough but for 10 users, it would probably be fine.


I really think that for a small number of users, there's little benefit in 
lots of RAM; both are much faster than the modem, but the RAM isn't much 
faster than disk, especially when the real bottlenech is the 10 Mbs NICs 
you're likely to have; my didk drives range in speed from about 4 
Mbyte/sec to 16; all are faster than my 100 Mbs NIC.

If you have a box to hand, anything from P100 & 32 Mbytes up should 
suffice (maybe even a 486, but I'd still want the 32 Mb); if you're buying 
new, the cheapest PC you can find...


-- 
Cheers
John Summerfield
http://os2.ami.com.au/os2/ for OS/2 support.
Configuration, networking, combined IBM ftpsites index.