Summary
How to increase the Smoothwall Filter's performance in light of high memory usage and hard disk activity.
Problem
The Filter's processes show an increase in hard disk activity and are using all the memory. This is causing performance issues, including users experiencing slow browsing.
Solution
You can adjust the web proxy minimum cached object size. This should decrease hard disk activity and memory usage as it prevents the web proxy from caching all elements from a web page. Only larger page objects will be cached. This is recommended for networks where caching is a secondary concern, that is, where the internet connection is of 20Mb or more.
It is recommended you change the cache size from the default value of 0 kilobytes (KB) to 10 KB. You do this in the Smoothwall administration user interface, Web proxy > Web proxy > Settings > Advanced > Min object size. Ensure you click Save and restart with a cleared cache to aid performance.