Jussara Almeida and Pei Cao
Department of Computer Sciences
University of Wisconsin-Madison
jussara,cao@cs.wisc.edu
As Web proxies become increasingly widespread, there is a critical need to establish a benchmark that can compare the performance of different proxy servers and predict their performance in practice. In this paper, we describe the Wisconsin Proxy Benchmark (WPB) and the performance comparison of four proxy software using the Benchmark. Using the benchmark, we also study the effect of more disk arms on proxy performance, and the effect of low-bandwidth modem client connections. We find that proxy implementations differ in their performance characteristics significantly. In addition, though disk arms appear to be the bottlenecks in proxy throughput, adding extra disks does not result in performance improvement for all proxy implementations. Finally, we find that the latency advantage of caching proxies vanishes in front of modem connections.