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 of the publicly available proxy software. Here is a report of our experience. We also conducted a very preliminary test of the collection of 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 understanding of the architecture of the proxy products and our experience with installing and testing them.

Note: the benchmark results reported here are very preliminary, and should be in no way 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 event driven;
installation experience: how to install the software, easy or hard (for us)
configuration experience: how to configure the system. Basically, there are three typical ways to configure the proxy:

using a configuration file, that is, the administrator manually edits the configuration file
using a web based configuration interface
using the command line arguments when starting the proxy program

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, pre-forked processes
    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;

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; integrates the proxy software and the OS;

Sun NetraServer

commercial product; not available to us;

Inktomi TrafficServer

commercial product; comes as both a software-only product and a software/OS integrated 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 2.6 machine. The installation guide on the Web apparently only covers installation on WinNT. We simply can't figure out how to install it. IBM didn't offer much help.

Intel QuickWeb

commercial product. Performs image compression and caching. Only available through ISPs using it. Intel claims that about three ISPs are using this product.

DynaCache

commercial product. Evaluation versions not available to us.

WebSpeed

From Duane,
"Packetstorm Technologies sells a caching appliance called WebSpeed which runs Squid and is configured for transparent caching. "