8.8 Which Is Best for Me?

Squid's storage scheme choices may seem a little overwhelming and confusing. Is aufs better than diskd ? Does my system support aufs or coss ? Will I lose my data if I use one of these fancy schemes? Is it okay to mix-and-match storage schemes?

First of all, if your Squid is lightly used (say, less than five requests per second), the default ufs storage scheme should be sufficient. You probably won't see a noticeable performance improvement from the other schemes at this low request rate.

If you are trying to decide which scheme to try, your operating system may be a determining factor. For example, aufs runs well on Linux and Solaris but seems to have problems on other systems. The coss code uses functions that aren't available on certain operating systems (e.g., NetBSD) at this time.

It seems to me that higher-performing storage schemes are also more susceptible to data loss in the event of a system crash. This is the tradeoff for better performance. For many people, however, cached data is of relatively low value. If Squid's cache becomes corrupted due to a crash, you may find it easier to simply newfs the disk partition and let the cache fill back up from scratch. If you find it difficult or expensive to replace the contents of Squid's cache, you probably want to use one of the slow, but reliable, filesystems and storage schemes.

Squid certainly allows you to use different filesystems and storage schemes for each cache_dir . In practice, however, this is uncommon. You'll probably have fewer hassles if all cache directories are approximately the same size and use the same storage scheme.