Filesystem Tuning Options

First of all, you should never use RAID for Squid cache directories. In my
experience, RAID always degrades filesystem performance for Squid. It is much
better to have a number of separate filesystems, each dedicated to a single disk
drive.
I have found four simple ways to improve UFS performance for Squid. Some of
these are specific to certain operating systems, such as BSD and Linux, and may
not be available on your platform:
Some UFS implementations support a noatime mount option. Filesystems
mounted with noatime don't update the inode access time value for reads. The
easiest way to use this option is to add it to the /etc/fstab like this:

# Device
/dev/ad1s1c

Mountpoint
/cache0

FStype
ufs

Options
rw,noatime

Dump
0

Pass#
0

Check your mount(8) manpage for the async option. With this option set, certain
I/O

operations (such as directory updates) may be performed asynchronously. The

documentation for some systems notes that it is a dangerous flag. Should your
system crash, you may lose the entire filesystem. For many installations, the
performance improvement is worth the risk. You should use this option only if you
don't mind losing the contents of your entire cache. If the cached data is very
valuable, the async option is probably not for you.
BSD has a feature called soft updates. Soft updates are BSD's alternative to
journaling filesystems.

On FreeBSD, you can enable this option on an unmounted filesystem with the
tunefs command:
For further information, please see "Soft Updates: A Technique for
Eliminating Most Synchronous Writes in the Fast File System" by Marshall
Kirk McKusik and Gregory R. Ganger. Proceedings of the 1999 USENIX
Annual Technical Conference, June 6-11, 1999, Monterey, California.
# umount /cache0
# tunefs -n enable /cache0
# mount /cache0
You only have to run the tunefs once for each filesystem. Soft updates are
automatically enabled on the filesystem again when your system reboots.

On OpenBSD and NetBSD, you can use the softdep mount option:
# Device
Mountpoint
FStype Options
Dump
/dev/sd0f
/usr
ffs
rw,softdep
1

Pass#
2

If you're like me, you're probably wondering what the difference is between the
async option and soft updates. One important difference is that soft update code
has been designed to maintain filesystem consistency in the event of a system
crash, while the async option has not.
This might lead you to conclude that async performs better than soft updates.
Previously, I mentioned that UFS performance, especially writing, depends on the
amount of free space. Disk writes for empty filesystems are much faster than for
full ones. This is one reason behind UFS's minfree parameter and space/time
optimization tradeoffs. If your cache disks are full and Squid's performance seems
bad, try reducing the cache_dir capacity values so that more free space is available.
Of course, this reduction in cache size also decreases your hit ratio, but the
response time improvement may be worth it. If you're buying the components for
a new Squid cache, consider getting much larger disks than you need and using
only half the space.