next up previous
Next: Master Process Up: Measuring Proxy Performance with Previous: Introduction

Wisconsin Proxy Benchmark

As the World-Wide Web continues to grow, many institutions are considering the installation of proxy servers for performance and security reasons. As the industry moves to meet customer demands and produces many Web proxy server products, there is a critical need for a benchmark that can compare the performance of various proxy products. This section describes our effort to build a proxy benchmark called the Wisconsin Proxy Benchmark (WPB).

Figure  1 shows an overview of the design of WPB and illustrates a typical benchmarking setup. The general setup of the benchmark is that a collection of Web client machines are connected to the proxy system under testing, which is in turn connected to a collection of Web server machines. There can be more than one client or server processes running on a client or server machine. The client and server processes run the client and server codes in the benchmark, instead of running a browser or a Web server. There is also a master process to coordinate the actions of client processes and generate an overall performance report. Some of the setup parameters are defined in a configuration file. The following sections describe each of the main component of WPB as well as the main performance metrics reported.


 
Figure 1:   Design of WPB 1.0
\begin{figure}
\centerline{

\psfig {figure=design.ps,width=\textwidth}

}\end{figure}



 
next up previous
Next: Master Process Up: Measuring Proxy Performance with Previous: Introduction
Pei Cao
4/13/1998