%cpu in system - squid performance in FreeBSD 5.3

[Jeff Behl]

howdy,

I've got a dual proc AMD64 (2gHz) FreeBSD 5.3R system running two squid
processes (to take advantage of both CPUs).  Each process is doing
around 195 req/s, and the total bandwidth is ~40Mb/s (gig nic via bge
driver).  Squid is being used exclusively as a reverse proxy, with all 
content being served out of memory (very little disk activity).

Top shows:

CPU states: 16.0% user,  0.0% nice, 42.7% system,  7.6% interrupt, 33.6%
idle
Mem: 898M Active, 569M Inact, 179M Wired, 214M Buf, 171M Free
Swap: 4069M Total, 4069M Free

  PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE  C   TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
14598 squid    108    0   463M   459M select 0  39.2H 59.96% 59.96% squid
14605 squid    105    0   421M   416M CPU0   1  38.4H 49.95% 49.95% squid

but the % system time can fluctuate up to 60 at times.  My question is
if this is about the type of performance I could expect, or if people
have seen better.  I was expecting to see much better performance,
seeing how everything is being served out of memory, but maybe I'm
asking too much?  400 reqs/s from RAM doesn't seem like much.  Is this a 
FreeBSD issue (anybody else with similar experience)?  A majority of the 
cpu time being spent in system would seem to indictate such.  What is 
all the system load?  How can i tell?

Any help/pointers/remarks appreciated

thanks,
jeff


FreeBSD www1.cdn.sjc 5.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE #1: Mon Nov  8 
20:25:59 PST 2004     root at www1.cdn.sjc:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/SMP  amd64