For clusters of nodes with CernVM-FS clients, we strongly recommend setting up two or more Squid forward proxy servers as well. The forward proxies will reduce the latency for the local worker nodes, which is critical for cold cache performance. They also reduce the load on the Stratum 1 servers.
From what we have seen, a Squid server on commodity hardware scales well for at least a couple of hundred worker nodes. The more RAM and hard disk you can devote for caching the better. We have good experience with memory cache and hard disk cache. We suggest setting up two identical Squid servers for reliability and load-balancing. Assuming the two servers are A and B, set
CVMFS_HTTP_PROXY="http://A:3128|http://B:3128"
Squid is very powerful and has lots of configuration and tuning options. For CernVM-FS we require only the very basic static content caching. If you already have a Frontier Squid installed you can use it as well for CernVM-FS.
One option that is particularly important when there are a lot of worker nodes and jobs that start close together is the collapsed_forwarding option. This combines multiple simultaneous requests for the same object into a single request to a Stratum 1 server. This did not work properly on squid versions prior to 3.5.28, which includes the default squid on EL7. This also works properly in Frontier Squid.
In any case, cache sizes and access control needs to be configured in order to use the Squid server with CernVM-FS. In order to do so, browse through your /etc/squid/squid.conf and make sure the following lines appear accordingly:
collapsed_forwarding on minimum_expiry_time 0 maximum_object_size 1024 MB cache_mem 128 MB maximum_object_size_in_memory 128 KB # 50 GB disk cache cache_dir ufs /var/spool/squid 50000 16 256
Furthermore, Squid needs to allow access to all Stratum 1 servers. This is controlled through Squid ACLs. Most sites allow all of their IP addresses to connect to any destination address. By default squid allows that for the standard private IP addresses, but if you're not using a private network then add your public address ranges, with something like this:
acl localnet src A.B.C.D/NN
If you instead want to limit the destinations to major cvmfs Stratum 1s, it is better to use the list built in to Frontier Squid because the list is sometimes updated with new releases.
The Squid configuration can be verified by squid -k parse. Before
the first service start, the cache space on the hard disk needs to be
prepared by squid -z. In order to make enough file descriptors
available to squid, execute ulimit -n 8192 or some higher number
prior to starting the squid service.