Ola,

Using a CF card as primary master and just about to add a harddrive as secondary master for web-caching but looking for advise on how to get the best performance out of it.

Is there a special way that the drive should be prepared before installing (i.e. formatted / partitioned in a certain way) or should it just be installed straight out of the box with no formatting and let RouterOS do all that?

I read somewhere that I will need about 15m of memory for ever 1gig of cache. Is this correct? Can someone explain why?

Lastly, is there a way of viewing the cached files or how much space is taken up with the cache? Would be useful to know if more cache space is required

Cheers,

P.

You can use Winbox to setup and monitor the cache. You do not need to format the drive before installing, but you can to verify that it is functioning properly. After you install the drive, you tell MT which drive to use for web-cache and have it format the drive. MT has a stats page that shows how much of the drive is being used and the hit rate for client access.

MT needs at least 50mb of memory for itself, and 15mb additional memory for each 1gb of hard drive space allocated to the web-cache. Most of what you need to know is explained here:
http://www.mikrotik.com/docs/ros/2.8/ip ... xy.content

Cheers Bill. You are a star.

Do you know if files that are older than 72 hours old automatically get flushed or if they just sit there until a new request comes in and then get cleared? Is there a way to increase the default expiry time over 72hours? Any other advice or anything I need to be aware of?

It may get overwritten by newer information, but the cache data on the hard drive doesn't seem to get erased. The counter restarts every time a page is accessed. If the html page header doesn't provide an expire time, the default of 72 hours is used. This can't be changed, and you don't really want it any longer.

The big benefit I see is the caching of images, especially ones that don't change often. The browsing experience is enhanced by quickly feeding the data from the cache, and bandwidth to the internet is available to serve other requests.

There's really not much to worry about. Put in the drive and start the router. Tell it to format the drive, then enable the web-proxy service when it's done. It takes a few minutes to get everything in order and startup, but you don't really need to do anything with it after that.

Leave the Maximum Cache Size at unlimited until you see how much it allocates to the cache, then go back and change the numbers to match. This will get rid of the message in the log everytime you start Winbox that says the cache size is limited by memory size.