Speed up your Internet access using Squid's refresh patterns
Submitted by srlinuxx on Thu, 11/20/2008 - 12:52.
Bandwidth limitation is still a problem for a lot of people who connect to the Internet. You can improve your available bandwidth by installing Squid caching proxy server on your network with configuration parameters that will increase your byte hit rate, giving you about 30-60% more bandwidth.
Squid can be fine-tuned to satisfy a host of needs. The stable version has at least 249 configurable parameters. The heavily commented configuration file, usually found in /etc/squid.conf, is more than 4,600 lines long. This can be intimidating to even experienced administrators. All settings are to be modified in this file.
You need a big cache that will not fill up in less than a week, and preferably should take more than a month to fill up. The actual size will be dependent on the volume of traffic on your network. The bigger the size of your storage, the greater the probability that the object someone is requesting for will already be in your cache.
re: Squid
With todays dynamic web, caching hardly ever helps for a small lan (or single computer).
Many (MANY) things can't be cached, and those that can, can also be cached locally in the browser cache.
Unless you're also doing content filtering, caching is more trouble then it's worth.
There's no such thing as a free lunch, and no matter how you spin the cache hit numbers (which only reflect traffic that can be cached, not overall traffic), you are NOT increasing your bandwidth by 30-60%.