Clearing Squid Cache

I've some squid servers running on linux vps(s). 
Sometimes, I faced the problem with either squid cannot cannot process anymore or it runs too slow because of Squid Cache. Here's the quick way to clear the squid cache. 


log on to you server or machine. 


Shit it down the Squid first. 

squid -k shutdown 

And remove the old squid cache. 

rm -f /var/lib/squid/cache/*

Initialize the new directory by running

squid -z 

Then starts the Squid again .

service squid start

 Anyway, you can do 'squid -z' directly without doing the earlier steps of clearing the files but it creates the new cache directories. It will not remove the old cache.