uTorrent and squid?

[janus zeal]

I have a SmoothWall gateway on my network that all of my computers go through. i want to use the built-in Squid cacheing proxy to cache pages, but ive read that it will effect p2p transfers badly.

i want to use transparent mode. would this effect p2p traffic?

[tain]

It depends on your usage and hardware. Heavy p2p usage has been known to bring routing/filtering devices to their knees. If p2p is your most important traffic then you should reflect that fact in your QoS settings as well.

I've wanted to try SmoothWall out for a while now. How do you like it?

[janus zeal]

I've wanted to try SmoothWall out for a while now. How do you like it?

Its awesome. a hugh improvement over my netgear rangemax router (latency, transfer speed. no more droped connections).

lots of features, easy to set up. etc.

here is my setup:

roadrunner voip modem [20 mbps] --> smoothwall router --> dlink switch --> asus 802.11g ap / computers

smoothwall specs:

VIA mini itx mainboard with intagrated 800 MHz cpu, 256 MB DDR ram, 80 gb hdd...

i think i will just set up squid to run on port 800 and manually set up the proxy on the computers, that way p2p traffic doesnt go through the cache...

[tain]

Nice setup

i think i will just set up squid to run on port 800 and manually set up the proxy on the computers, that way p2p traffic doesnt go through the cache...

Oh wait, are you saying that the transparent proxy would attempt to cache all of the p2p traffic?

[janus zeal]

Nice setup

i think i will just set up squid to run on port 800 and manually set up the proxy on the computers, that way p2p traffic doesnt go through the cache...

Oh wait, are you saying that the transparent proxy would attempt to cache all of the p2p traffic?

i dont know, thats what im asking. i might just set it to be manual just to be safe. i dont know if it will only sent http traffic through the cache, thats why i was worried about it being slow.

oh, and thanks. ^_^

---edit---

someone at the SmoothWall forums answered. the squid cache only sends http traffic through, so it wont effect uTorrent. ^_^

Edited July 24, 2006 by janus zeal

[tain]

someone at the SmoothWall forums answered. the squid cache only sends http traffic through, so it wont effect uTorrent. ^_^

That sounds right. Your question was definitely valid though. Do any other transparent proxies have an issue like that? I guess it would come down to the proxy/cache configuration, but with default settings it wouldn't make any sense to try caching anything other than web pages.

So with SmoothWall in transparent mode, all traffic would hit the proxy and all web pages would get cached?

Versus your setup (non-transparent, specified port) only web traffic would hit the proxy and all web pages would get cached?

What all are you using the proxy for? Web filtering/caching seems more obvious than access control in your scenario.

[LLXX]

Proxies shouldn't cache P2P traffic, since caching wouldn't really improve performance at all, unlike repeatedly viewed webpages.

[tain]

That would make sense, but can we count it to always be the case?