Earlier in the month I wrote in asking for help figuring out why my
Squid proxy server would grind the box to a halt.  I believe I have
resolved the issue.  It was a combination of the following issues:

1) I found several machines in an obscure part of my network which were
infected with some sort of worm
2) This was causing an exorbinant ammonut of connections destined to
random addresses on port 80
3) This in turn was causing squid to run out of file descriptors.

It should be noted by default OpenBSD places rather conservative limits
on open FDs.

Raising the the per-user limit in the kernel VIA the kern.maxfiles
sysctl variable and then raising the login.conf limits prior to starting
squid fixed the problem.

I of course also cleaned the machines that were infected ;)

Just thought this would be noteworthy in the archive as I'm sure I'm not
the only person that's ever stumbled across this.

Regards,
Daniel

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]