Firewall Speed
The firewall with web caching has really been slow. The hard drive light was on regularly and I was sure that my web browsing was hampered. I had tried to tweak squid and squidGuard to use less hard drive space and RAM, but loading some pages still seemed to crawl. Yesterday I logged into the firewall machine to check the memory usage – 100%. The machine was swapping in and out causing the hard drive to run excessively. That’s when I realized there was only 48mb of RAM in that machine. 48! Holy smokes! No wonder it was trying to create a swap storm. As a firewall 48mb is fine, as a web-cache and proxy, not so much.
I pulled the cover off the PC case and saw that the CPU fan wasn’t turning either. I got a fan off the shelf, swapped out the old style ram for more up-to-date SIMMS – one stick of 256mb and one 64mb stick. I fired it up and it booted (which is the absolute best thing that can happen after surgery). Now my AMD K-6 II is running cool with its new fan and swap space on the hard drive hasn’t been touched. Never underestimate the power of more RAM.
