Topic: e-smith proxy slow to respond

[oracle]

Hi All.

Have had alot of fun with e-smith 4.0 and so far only one problem.

It has to do with the proxy part of e-smith and I will try to explain it.

I have a PII 233Mhz Intel 64Mb RAM 1.6Gb HDD machine runnin the latest v4 e-smith. I have a small lan only connected to the esmith server comprising of one 5500 PPC Mac (OS 8.6) and a toshiba laptop running Win95B. Both client machines are running netscape (browser version 4.08).

Both machines are pointed to port 3128 for proxy and although the proxy will respond very quickly with pages previously cached, it seems to take its own sweet time requesting pages from my ISP's proxy up the road (modem lights flash for a split sec and then nothing for about 60 secs) If left alone, the page requested will eventually appear. I didn't think it strange until I pointed both machines at the ISP proxy and wow, things were happening nice and quick....

Any ideas on where to look ?

Nothing about e-smith on this install has been changed from factory.....and yes I would like to make use of the proxy server.

TIA

oracle

[Charlie Brady]

oracle wrote:

> I have a PII 233Mhz Intel 64Mb RAM 1.6Gb HDD machine runnin the
> latest v4 e-smith.

Including the update, I presume.

> Both machines are pointed to port 3128 for proxy and although
> the proxy will respond very quickly with pages previously
> cached, it seems to take its own sweet time requesting pages
> from my ISP's proxy up the road (modem lights flash for a split
> sec and then nothing for about 60 secs) If left alone, the page
> requested will eventually appear. I didn't think it strange
> until I pointed both machines at the ISP proxy and wow, things
> were happening nice and quick....
>
> Any ideas on where to look ?

You should look at the squid logs in /var/log/squid/.

It sounds as though squid is failing to fetch objects from its upstream cache, and is then fetching them directly. You should check your proxy settings in the manager, or perhaps try configuring it to fetch directly, rather than via your ISP's cache.

I notice that you are using dialup and you are based in Australia. Be careful with the dial-on-demand feature, you can end up with a large phone bill using an e-smith server in that fashion.

Regards

Charlie

[oracle]

Thanks for the info Charlie.

Yes I am using in dialup mode and just for the moment it is of no concern as the server is never left on for any great length of time and so far being set in medium dialup mode, it nevers drops off anyway.

As for your suggestion to make e-smith fetch directly to the net, unfortunately I cannot as my ISP requires all accounts to go via the proxy. Access to the net directly is blocked.

I will however view the logs and see what they tell me.

Regards oracle