A Comparison of Public Proxy Software using Wisconsin Proxy Benchmark
Jin Zhang and Pei Cao
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Following Duane's
list of available proxy software, we downloaded and tried to install
all the publicly available proxy software. Here is a report of our experience.
We also conducted a preliminary test of the software using a small
configuration of the Wisconsin Proxy Benchmark. We report our results here.
You should read Duane's
brief description of the proxy software first, and then read this document.
This document includes our understand of the proxy architecture and our
experience with installing them and testing them.
Note: the benchmark results reported here are very preliminary, and
should not be considered as any significant indication of the proxy's performance.
The configuration of the benchmark is described here.
For each proxy, we listed blow:
-
architecture of the system: process based, thread based or even driven
architecture
-
installation experience: how to install the software, easy or not
-
configuration experience: how to configure the system. Basically, there
are three different ways to configure the proxy:
-
using a configuration file, user manually edit the configuration file
-
using a web based configuration interface
-
using the command line arguments
-
limitation: the limitation we observed about the proxy
-
result
CERN/W3C
architecture: process based, fork
one process on each request
installation: run make
configure:
configuration file
see
result here
Harvest
see Squid and Netcache
Netscape
commercial product
Netcache
commercial product
Squid
architecuture: single process, event-driven
model
installation:
simple, just "make install"
configure:
configuration file
see
result here
DeleGate
architecture: process based proxy,
fork one process on each request
installation: relatively
simple, may need to change a little bit of Makefile before running make
configure:
quite a lot of command line options
limitation:
can not specify the cache size
see
result here
Microsoft
commercial product; runs on WinNT only; rumors is that
it will come free with WinNT 5.0;
Wcol
architecture: process based,
pre-fork processes
installation: relatively
simple, run configure and make
configure:
configuration file
limitation:
can not run without caching
see
result here
Novell BorderManager
commercial product; runs on Novell's own operating system;
in other words, software/OS integrated;
Apache
architecture: process based
configure:
configuration file
see
result here
Jigsaw
architecture: thread based, pre-fork threads
installation: simple, run
java install to install
configure:
uses web-based interface for configuration. But need to learn much about
the system architecture before knowing how to configure.
limitation:
proxy returns "HTTP/1.1 200" even if the original server returns
"HTTP/1.0 200"
see
result here
CacheFlow
commercial product; not available to us.
Open Sesame
commercial product; the current beta doesn't run on Solaris. New beta out
around July 7th.
Roxen
architecture: thread based
installation: relatively
simple, runs configure, make install, install
configure:
web-based configuration interface. Need some time to figure out, but not
very difficult.
limitation:
when the server replies with "Expires:" header, the proxy does not
cache the document.
see
result here
Spaghetti
commercial product; runs only on Windows NT.
MOWS
architecture: thread based, create
a new thread on each request.
installation: comes
with bytecode, no installation needed after unpack the package
configure:
configuration file, need to know a little bit about system architecuture
and
the modules of the system.
see
result here
Cisco CacheEngine
Commercial product; software/OS integrated; comes as a box;
Sun NetraServer
Commercial product; new versions will have software/OS integrated. Not
available to us.
Inktomi TrafficServer
Commercial product. Comes as a software-only product and a software/OS
combined product. We have not been able to obtain an evaluation version.
IBM Web Traffic Express
Commercial product. We got an evaluation version off the Web, but can't
install it on our Solaris machine. The Web page on installation apparently
only address installation on WinNT. We simply can't figure out how to install
it. IBM was no help on this.
Intel QuickWeb
Performs image compression and caching. Commercial product. Only available
through ISPs using it. Intel claims that about three ISPs are using this
product.
DynaCache
Commercial product. Evaluation version not available to us.
WebSpeed
From Duane,
"Packetstorm Technologies sells a caching appliance called WebSpeed
which runs Squid and is configured for transparent caching. "