Speed your web browsing WAY up with Squid3
I haven’t tried this in a long time, but I used to run Squid3 at home on my pfSense router box (older Pentium 4 — worked great) and I just had the idea to use it on my laptop to speed up web browsing. It makes a HUGE difference and now pages look like they’re using AJAX for requests since the images and headers and stuff just stay put when moving between pages. RAM cache is monumentally faster than disk cache, and we’re just totally disabling disk caching / log files with this squid3 config.
To set this up, you’ll need to install squid3, set your web browser to use 127.0.0.1 (sometimes the POSIX standard of just ’0′ isn’t supported because some developers make crappy software that isn’t really POSIX) port 3128 as a proxy for HTTP (you could cache HTTPS too but IMO it’s not worth it for just general browsing), paste the stuff below at the bottom of your squid3 config file (/etc/squid3/squid.conf on Ubuntu 11.04 for me) and restart squid3 (/etc/init.d/squid3 restart).
I left most of the stuff default, but I disabled the log files and set the RAM cache down to 128 MB. You can adjust as necessary.
Update: Put some comments in to help with getting this working in Squid v2.x, disk cache, and making it work on your local network ![]()
## root@helios:/etc/squid3# egrep -v '^#' squid.conf |tr -s '\n' ## uncomment next line if using squid 2 #acl all src 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 ## example of how to let your whole local 192.168.1.0/24 network use the cache #acl localnet src 192.168.1.0/24 #http_access allow manager localnet #http_access allow localnet acl manager proto cache_object acl localhost src 127.0.0.1/32 acl to_localhost dst 127.0.0.0/8 0.0.0.0/32 acl SSL_ports port 443 acl Safe_ports port 80 # http acl Safe_ports port 21 # ftp acl Safe_ports port 443 # https acl Safe_ports port 70 # gopher acl Safe_ports port 210 # wais acl Safe_ports port 1025-65535 # unregistered ports acl Safe_ports port 280 # http-mgmt acl Safe_ports port 488 # gss-http acl Safe_ports port 591 # filemaker acl Safe_ports port 777 # multiling http acl CONNECT method CONNECT http_access allow manager localhost http_access deny manager http_access deny !Safe_ports http_access deny CONNECT !SSL_ports http_access allow localhost http_access deny all http_port 3128 hierarchy_stoplist cgi-bin ? cache_mem 128 MB maximum_object_size_in_memory 512 KB memory_replacement_policy heap LFUDA coredump_dir /var/spool/squid3 refresh_pattern ^ftp: 1440 20% 10080 refresh_pattern ^gopher: 1440 0% 1440 refresh_pattern -i (/cgi-bin/|\?) 0 0% 0 refresh_pattern . 0 20% 4320 ## disk cache stuff if you want #cache_replacement_policy heap LFUDA #cache_dir aufs /var/spool/squid 4096 16 256 #minimum_object_size 0 KB #maximum_object_size 4096 KB #cache_swap_low 90 #cache_swap_high 95 ## disable all logging for better performance access_log none cache_store_log none cache_log /dev/null






