Debugging problems

Mostly, we encounter problems that are well-known and are a result of configuration glitches or operating system limitations. So, those problems can be fixed easily by tweaking configuration files. However, sometimes we may face problems that cannot be solved directly or we may not even be able to identify them by simply looking at the log files.

By default, Squid only logs the essential information to cache.log. To inspect or debug problems, we need to increase the verbosity of the logs so that Squid can tell us more about the actions it's taking, which may help us find the source of the problem. We can extract information from Squid about its actions at our convenience by using the debug_options directive in the Squid configuration file.

Let's have a look at the format of the debug_options directive:

debug_options rotate=N section,verbosity [section,verbosity]...

The parameter rotate (rotate=N) specifies the number of cache.log files that will be maintained when Squid logs...