pfSense: Speed-up Transparent Squid Proxy

Its been a few days that I did some tweaking on Squid Proxy and it appears stable! This all came about as I was trying to speed-up data fetching and finding that for some reason the cache was just too slow for actual use. I wondered if it was at all worth it (obviously slow proxy means unhappy users ... especially if its your home users).

In gratitude to the discussion I found in the forum, its reposted and message re-arranged here in summary below:

Question:
Why squid is so slow?

Answer:
The default configuration of pfSense is a router not as a server, that is why kern.ipc.nmbclusters="0". Simply remove this line and Squid will be just fine.

Add the lines below to the /boot/loader.conf
kern.ipc.nmbclusters=32768
kern.maxfiles=65536
kern.maxfilesperproc=32768
net.inet.ip.portrange.last=65535

Alternatively, just delete it and replace with:
autoboot_delay="1"
#kern.ipc.nmbclusters="0"
hint.apic.0.disabled=1
kern.hz=100
#for squid
kern.ipc.nmbclusters="32768"
kern.maxfiles="65536"
kern.maxfilesperproc="32768"
net.inet.ip.portrange.last="65535"

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