Measuring Proxy Performance with the Wisconsin Proxy Benchmark

As Web proxies become increasingly widespread there is a critical need to establish a benchmark that can compare the performance of di erent 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 e ect of more disk arms on proxy performance and the e ect of low bandwidth modem client connections We nd that proxy implementations di er in their performance characteristics signi cantly In addition though disk arms appear to be the bottlenecks in proxy throughput adding extra disks does not result in performance improve ment for all proxy implementations Finally we nd that the latency advantage of caching proxies vanishes in front of modem connections