The helper multiplexer's purpose is to relieve some of the burden squid has when dealing with slow helpers. It does so by acting as a middleman between squid and the actual helpers, talking to squid via the multiplexed variant of the helper protocol and to the helpers via the non-multiplexed variant. Helpers are started on demand, and in theory the muxer can handle up to 1k helpers per instance. It's up to squid to decide how many helpers to start. The muxer knows nothing about the actual messages being passed around, and as such can't really (yet?) compensate for broken helpers. It is not yet able to manage dying helpers, but it will. The helper can be controlled using various signals: - SIGHUP: dump the state of all helpers to STDERR