[squid-users] [Troubleshoot] Squid 3.3 - Lots of 403 erros when reducing the workers number

[Xavier Lecluse]

Hello everybody,
I am new to this list so feel free to react if my request is incorrect in any way (missing topic, tag, ....)

We are using two squid proxies (Squid 3.3) behind a load balancer, to handle our users requests (http/https).

The "hardware" of our VMs is :
2 vCPU @ 4.0GHz
4 Go Ram
iSCSI disks


In order to address some issues with Java clients, we tried to lower the worker directive from 8 to 1, because of the relative low number of simultaneous connections on our SSquid servers (about 100rq/s)
After reducing the worker value to 1, and restarting the proxies, we observed a great number of 403 errors, so we decided to rollback to 8 workers.


My questions are :
- How the number of workers and these 403 errors can be correlated ?
- Is there any "recommandations" about the number of workers to use, for a given number of request/s ?


The inital problem is from some java clients, which are using two TCP sessions, one for the authentication, and another one for the HTTP(s) requests.
The fact is that the "second" session is not always opened on the same worker, so ot considers that the authentication step has not already been done.

Is there a way to address this issue ?

Thank you.
Xavier