xProxy: A Transparent Caching and Delta Transfer System for Web Objects by Mihut

The demand for bandwidth in computer networks has been growing at a steady pace for the last several years, and a significant portion of that traffic is for the World Wide Web. At the same time, a large fraction of Internet users continue to rely on slow “last mile” links, such as modems and wireless links. We present xProxy, a transparent proxy system that uses deltas and compression to increase the performance of web traffic over slow links. By using compression, the average modem transfer time for HTML pages can be reduced by a factor of 2.6, while the use of compressed deltas can reduce the transfer time by a factor of 6.2. Also, xProxy was used by four people over 10 days, and provided total “real” bandwidth savings of 53.2%. The techniques used by our system, if utilized by other proxies and/or web servers, could also reduce the amount of web traffic that traverses any network.