A proxy server experiment: an indication of the changing nature of the Web

With the growing reliance on connectivity to the World-Wide Web (Web), many organizations have been experiencing trouble servicing their users with adequate access and response time. Increase bandwidth on more connections to the Web can relieve the access problem, but this approach may not decrease the access time. Additionally, increase bandwidth comes at greatly increased cost. Therefore, many organizations have turned to the use of proxy servers. A proxy server is a Web server that caches Internet resources for re-use by a set of client machines. The performance increases of proxy servers has been widely reported; however, we could not locate any test of proxy server performance. Given the exponential growth of the Web in just the last year, we wondered if this would have an effect on the performance of proxy servers. Therefore, we conducted a 14-day proxy server experiment. The results of our experiment showed that the proxy servers actually decreased performance, i.e. access time. We review this experiment, analyze why the proxy server failed to decrease the access time, and draw conclusions on the changing nature of the Web and its impact on proxy servers.