If you have large number of proxy users & you start to feel browsing is getting slower, and upon insecting squid cache log /var/log/squid/cache.log you see below error …
WARNING! Your cache is running out of filedescriptors
It means Squid proxy server is running out of file descriptors and cannot handle the extra requests sent by your client computers. therefore you need to increase descriptors value.
Use the following command to see the current descriptors value
squidclient -p 8080 mgr:info | grep 'file descri'
Result As showed in the image below . . .
As you can see current file descriptors are 1024. To increase this value, edit your squid.conf file by
nano /etc/squid/squid.conf
Now add this line
max_filedesc 4096
OR [depends on squid version you may need this]
max_filedescriptor
Save and exit editor.
Now restart your squid service to apply the changes you made by
service squid restart
Use following command to see the descriptors value
squidclient -p 8080 mgr:info | grep ‘file descri’
and this time you will notice that file descriptors have increased.
Result As showed in the image below . . .
Some Additional Tip!
nano /etc/sysctl.conf
Add following line in starting
fs.file-max = 65535
Save & Exit.
Now run following command to update
systcl -p
Regard’s
Syed Jahanzaib
Syed Jahanzaib - Personal Blog to Share Knowledge ! 
As’slaam-o-Alaikum
Shah gee can you please send me your Cell phone number for contact please
Regards
Muhammad Imran Khan
cell # 03137633665
imran_niazi_2004@hotmail.com
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Comment by Muhammad Imran Khan — March 22, 2012 @ 10:48 PM
You can email me for any discussion and advise you may need 🙂
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Comment by Syed Jahanzaib / Pinochio~:) — March 24, 2012 @ 4:18 PM
Sir,
I’m recently working on Internet providing through Cable and Wirless Wifi . I’m using Mikrotik 3.22 as router with 40 clients including 15 on WiFi.
Sir,
1:- my network’s basic load is (YOU-TUBE) more than 18 clients open (YOU-TUBE) for same video and downloads.
that causes me more bandwidth download and increases my PTCL billing.
I’v used one of your blog about squid proxy server config and LUSCA/Squid also and checked them both it works fine but after power failure it doesn’t.second I’m not able to connect Squid to Mikrotik to bypass Request coming from clients.
2:- Can you please brief me about CC-PROXY server and how I can Redirect all request from Mikrotik to CC-PROXY in Transparent mode
Can you please send me complete set-up Config to solve my problem
Regard,
Muhammad Imran Khan
imran_niazi_2004@hotmail.com
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Comment by Muhammad Imran Khan — April 4, 2012 @ 10:12 PM
# If configuration is getting lost (Which I don’t know why its happening, as it never happened with me) , try to cache you-tube using SQUID method as follow:
# I have no experience with CC proxy, as its not a standard solution.
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Comment by Syed Jahanzaib / Pinochio~:) — April 5, 2012 @ 8:55 AM
Thanks for Replying Sir,
Sir can you tell about you residence and City
Are you from Lahore
Regards
Muhammad Imran Khan
0313-7633665
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Comment by Muhammad Imran Khan — April 14, 2012 @ 9:29 PM
I have over 1500 concurrent user…..can you please let me know what hardware configuration will match these number of user if i want to use squid/ Lusca Youtube caching ?Can u advise me what number of file descriptors will use in this scenario ?
Any suggestion will be very gladly appropriated .
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Comment by Ferdous hasan — March 24, 2012 @ 10:36 AM
or…you can modified the init script into some kind like this
#
# Try to increase the # of filedescriptors we can open.
#
maxfds () {
[ -n “$SQUID_MAXFD” ] || return
[ -f /proc/sys/fs/file-max ] || return 0
global_file_max=`cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max`
minimal_file_max=$(($SQUID_MAXFD + 65536))
if [ “$global_file_max” -lt $minimal_file_max ]
then
echo $minimal_file_max > /proc/sys/fs/file-max
fi
ulimit -n $SQUID_MAXFD
}
put it above start script….
and change 65536 into some number that fit inb your networks
regards from indonesia…
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Comment by Metromini KasKus — June 21, 2012 @ 1:46 PM
Thanks for the tip!
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Comment by Syed Jahanzaib / Pinochio~:) — June 21, 2012 @ 4:12 PM
Mr. Syed how are you
I’m glade to contact you i like your page and your tutorials in mikrotik, I have a question: there is a program called HandyCache can work on windows when you use it with appserv program can you make a tutorial about it and how to connected it with a mikrotik in a network………… Regards from Iraq to your work and to you…. thank you
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Comment by osama ismail — July 5, 2014 @ 1:17 AM
I have not worked with handycache, but for sure every proxy runs on ip/port. Simply create a dst-nat rule on mikrotik that redirects port 80 request to handycache ip/port. simple is that. I have few guides on it on my blog, search dst-nat
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Comment by Syed Jahanzaib / Pinochio~:) — July 6, 2014 @ 11:12 AM
Dear Shah G,
I have 2 squid proxy servers on RHEL 5.5, on one i am getting message you are running out of file descriptors. while running command ulimit -n, it shows 32768 and when running the command “squidclient -p 8080 mrg:info | grep ‘file descri’ it shows “maximum number of file descriptor: 1024” Please help me to set the descriptors to 32768.
Thank you in advance.
JazakAllah
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Comment by Sarfraz Aslam — June 15, 2016 @ 10:31 AM
Hi, thanks for sharing this!
Official Squid docs for 2.7 refer that option as “max_filedescriptors” instead of “max_filedesc” in your post.
Maybe it is worth to point out that version difference.
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Comment by Marc Richter (@marc_richter) — June 1, 2017 @ 3:08 PM
Thx for followup
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Comment by Syed Jahanzaib / Pinochio~:) — June 3, 2017 @ 10:12 AM
Thx for the tip.
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Comment by Syed Jahanzaib / Pinochio~:) — June 6, 2017 @ 10:43 AM