Low hit rate of Squid caching on pfSense

Hardware Hub Networking
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1

I am using Squid on pfSense to cache Steam downloads and it is working to a degree but the longer the wait after the initial download the likely hood of the cache working diminishes significantly and the hit-rate drops. I am certain that the data in question is still on the pfSense box as the disk usage is till at the same level after the initial download and hasn’t changed.

When I first installed Squid I tested it by installing Trine, deleting, repeat and it works if I initiate the download soon after but if I wait for an hour or so the hit-rate drops to almost nothing even though the data is still on the disk. What is happening? Is this intentional and Squid is working correctly or have I mis-configured something?

2

I'd say the problem is that there are hundreds of CDN servers for steam, so after a few minutes when the cache on your DNS server refreshes it hits a different steam server. I'm not exactly sure what the best way to get around this would be other than to use something specific for steam caching.

3

That is unfortunate, I may look into something like LANCache in the future but in the mean time I may block caching of Steam as my pfSense boxes CPU usage goes up to 90% and network performance is slightly impacted by it.