Squid / OS interaction

Network

Caches tend to have many short-lived connections
End-user caches have a mix of slow/fast users and origins
Accelerators generally have fast origin connections

Simultaneous connections are a function of
Requests/sec
Average connection lifetime
2MSL (TCP maximum segment lifetime)

Squid caches generally require _lots_ of filedescriptors
Squid won't poll unused descriptors, so high (eg 16384) numbers are ok