On Performance of Caching Proxies

Abstract

This paper presents a performance study of the state-of-the-art caching proxy called Squid. We instrumented Squid to measure per request network and disk activities and conducted a series of experiments on large Web caches. We have discovered many interesting and consistent patterns across a wide variety of environments. Our data and analysis are essential for understanding, modeling, benchmarking, and tuning performance of a proxy server. Keywords: performance analysis, Web caching, caching proxy, profiling, Squid. ii 1 Introduction The World Wide Web has clearly become the environment for global information distribution, exchange, and sharing. Caching proxies are playing an important role in handling Web traffic. Web caching is one of the key methods for coping with the exponential growth of the Web. Caching proxies are usually installed where many clients are accessing the Internet through a single path. During the first client request to a Web object, a proxy cache stores a copy..