A Proxy Server Experiment: an
Indication of the Changing Nature of the Web
MAJ Richard Howard
Directorate of Information Management
United States Military Academy
West Point, NY 10996
Voice (914)938-7449
Fax: (914)938-5956
howard @ exmail.usma.edu
Abstract
With the growing reliance on connectivity to the
World-Wide Web (Web), many organizations have been
experiencing trouble servicing their users with adequate
access and response time. Increase bandwidth on more
connections to Web can relieve the access problem, but
this approach may not decrease the access time.
Additionally, increase bandwidth comes at greatly
increased cost. Therefore, many organizations have
turned to the use of proxy servers. A proxy server is a
Web server that caches Internet resources for re-use by
a set of client machines. The performance increases of
proxy servers has been widely reported: however, we
could not locate any recent test of proxy server
pegormanee. Given the exponential growth of the Web
in just the last year, we wondered i f this would have an
effect on the pelformance of proxy servers. Therefore,
we conducted a 14-day proxy server experiment. The
results of our experiment showed that the proxy servers
actually decreased performanee, i.e. access time. We
review this experiment, analyze why the proxy sever
failed to decrease access time, and draw conclusions on
the changing nature of the Web and its impact on proxy
servers.
Introduction
With the growing reliance on connectivity to the
World-Wide Web (Web), many organizations have been
experiencing trouble servicing their users with adequate
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$10.000 1998 IEEE
0-8186-9014-3/98
MAJ Bernard J . Jansen
Department of EE & CS
United States Military Academy
West Point, NY 10996
Voice:(914) 938-3233
Fax: (914)938-5956
jansen@exmail.usma.edu
access and response time as network and server loads
have increased dramatically. Increased bandwidth (i.e.,
more or “bigger” connections to Web) can relieve the
access problem, but increasing bandwidth may not
decrease the response time for users. Additionally,
increase bandwidth comes at greatly increased cost due
to typical monthly charges. Therefore, many
organizations, including businesses, schools,
universities, government, and military organizations
have turned to the use of proxy servers.
A proxy server is a Web server that caches Internet
resources for re-use by a set of client machines.
Caching proxies have been introduced to improve the
system performance with the assumption that a page
will be fetched many times before it is destroyed or
modified. The performance increases of proxy servers
has been widely reported. In fact, the praise of proxy
servers has been almost universal. However, we could
not locate any recently published, scholarly articles on
tests of proxy server performance. Therefore, we
conducted an experiment to measure if the use of a
proxy server would decrease access time for users on
the university WAN.
We present a brief description of and uses for a
proxy server. W e then review recent proxy server
literature, both from the trade press and from scholarly
journals. We then discuss the methodology of the
experiment and the nature of our network on which the
experiment was conducted. We follow this discussion
with the results of the experiment and conclude with
thoughts on why our results differed from those
previously reported and the implications for the future
of proxy servers on the Web
Proxy Servers
Proxy servers have two main purposes. They can
improve performance and filter requests. By filtering
requests, we mean an organization might use a proxy
server to prevent its employees from accessing a
specific set of Web sites. We are more concerned, for
this experiment, in the first purpose of a proxy server,
improving performance. Proxy servers can dramatically
improve performance for users of an organization. This
is because the proxy server saves the results of all
requests for a certain amount of time.
For example, consider the situation where both
User A and User B access the Web through the same
proxy server. First, User A requests a certain Web
page, which we will refer to as Web Page 1. The proxy
sever will forward, based on the Uniform Resource
Locator (URL), the request to the Web server where
Web Page 1 resides. Depending on the network’s Web
connection, the number of graphics in the Web page,
etc., this can be a time consuming operation. Now,
later, User B requests the same Web page. Instead of
forwarding the request to the Web server where Page 1
resides, the proxy server simply returns the Web Page 1
that it already fetched for User A. Since the proxy
server is usually on the same network as the user, this is
a much faster operation. If this series of actions is
repeated over several to hundreds of users, the
performance increase via reduced access time can a real
benefit to the users on a network. The major online
services such as CompuServe and America Online, for
example, employ an array of proxy servers to service
thousands of users [ 7 ] . If User B had requested a Web
page that had not been previously requested, the proxy
server forwards the request to the real Web server
designated in the URL. .
The storing of server requests by proxy servers is
referred to as caching. As stated, it was this aspect of
the proxy server that we were primarily interested in
studying. Web pages are modified, deleted, renamed
continuously, so the proxy server must have a means of
checking to see if the page that it has in cache is the
most current version. Briefly, a Web caching proxy
server “cruises” the Web and examines pages that are
currently cached on the server. If a page has been
modified, the proxy server stores the new version on a
local drive. Some proxy servers can also use certain
guidelines to hit links on that page to pull down related
pages. Most proxy servers are extremely efficient.
They can examine and store thousands of Web pages,
and when any local user on the LAN asks for a specific
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stored page, the page flies out of a local drive or cache
without Internet transmission delays.
To ensure that the proxy server can do it job, the
network must be set up so that users needing access to
the Web must use the proxy server as their Internet
gateway. One can accomplish this access control
through proper router setup, which places all users
“behind” the firewall.
Literature Review
Organizations that use Web proxy servers report
that the proxy server’s caching technology has greatly
reduced network costs. Many organizations bought
proxy servers in order to decrease access time.
However, they received an unexpected benefit when
caching reduced traffic on the Internet connections.
Industry analysts report that proxy servers often reduced
traffic enough to eliminate the need to add bandwidth
servers [ 3 ] . The demand for proxy servers among
businesses, organizations, government, and academic
was been strong. Microsoft, Netscape and Novel1 all
offer proxy-server software as part of their Internet
server suites. The demand is understandable given the
reported increases in performance from users. Reported
performance enhancements from proxy server for end
users is typically about 20 to 25%, i.e., a one-quarter
decrease in access time [ l ] [ 2 ] . Organizations also
reported high volume of proxy server cache access, as
high as 40% and extremely active caches with
thousands of Web documents [ 3 ] .
There has been very little discussion of limitations
or negative aspects of proxy servers. In general, proxy
servers generally cannot provide the sophisticated event
statistics, reports, alarms and audit tracking of
standalone firewalls. However, a high end proxy server
goes for about $1,000. Firewalls cost from $5,000 to
$50,000 [2].Also, industry experts caution that proxy
servers cannot take the place of a second, high-speed,
Web access line if the first is overloaded. Other than
these points, there have been very little reported
drawbacks of proxy servers.
With all the positive reports, it is no wonder that
proxy servers are still an active area of research. Most
of the research focuses on methods to increase the
performance aspect of proxy servers as opposed to the
filtering aspect of proxy servers. Jeffery, Das, and
Bernal [4] investigated the design and implications of an
extended proxy server that shares cache resources not
only itself, but also with near neighbors. They reported
a substantial reduction in network work load that can be
obtained from this proxy sharing. This shared cache
also lead to a corresponding increase in performance.
The best performance came from a simple
implementation model that is non-hierarchical; proxies 20% on the FDDI backbone, about 96% on the DREN
access each other using the natural topology of the Web. Gateway, and about 80% on NIPRNRT Gateway.
Instead of cache sharing, Law and Nandy [6]
investigated a distributed proxy server architecture that
can increase the service availability, provide system
scalability, coupled with load balancing capability. The
system employs TCP-based switching mechanism
which has a finer session granularity, and more dynamic
control on resource allocation. Finally, [5] researched
the ability of proxy servers to cache video.

Methodology
However, we could not locate any recent test of
proxy server performance. Given the exponential
growth of the Web in just the last or two year, we
wondered if this growth would have an effect on the
performance of proxy servers. Therefore, we conducted United States Mllitary Academy
FDDI Rings
a 14-day proxy server experiment. We first installed a West Poinf N.Y.
C U M I DNS
JP t n m
I
proxy server. We then review the sites that our network Figure 1: USMA Network.
users commonly visit. We selected one site,
www.microsoft.com, that was typical of the web sites The cadets use the network and Web extensively
that our users commonly visited. We then blocked for courses, both in the classroom and for research
direct access to this site for two weeks at the Firewall. projects. The faculty also uses the network and Web for
This action forced all users that desired to visit teaching preparation and research. Some typical sites
www.microsoft.com to go through the newly installed that are commonly visited are:
proxy server. Without this block, users could bypass
0 www 1.nytimes.com
the proxy server and our data set would not be as dense.
With any experiment of this type, one should get a sense 0 images.nytimes.com,
of the size, traffic load, and nature of the network users.
0 weather7.pvy.mci.net
0 www3.nytimes.com
The Network
The experiment was conducted at the United States 0 www7.nytimes.com
Military Academy (USMA), which is a four year, 0 www2.nytimes.com
undergraduate institution. USMA graduates about 1000
students, called cadets, per year. Almost all of the 0 www4.nytimes.com
graduating cadets immediately serve in the US Army.
0 www6.nytimes.com
All cadets, all faculty, and the majority of the staff have
computers and Internet access. 0 weatherl7.pcy.mci.net
The USMA network at has a Fiber Distributed Data
Interface (FDDI) backbone at 100 Mbps. About half of 0 wsfl.usatoday.com
our users are connected to the backbone via dedicated 0 www.fi)xnews.com
10 Mbps lines. Other users are connected to the
backbone via shared 10 Mbps lines. Our network is www.microsoft.com.
connected to the Web via two (2) connections, one
DREN and one NIPRNET. DREN is the Defense
Research Engineering Network and NIPRNET is Results and Explanation
uNclassified (but sensitive) Internet Protocol Routing We were expecting to see a substantial performance
NETwork). DREN is primarily for our education needs. gain by caching common documents that many users on
NIPRNET is the military Internet. Both run at about T1 the USMA visit repeatedly. Based on the architecture
speeds, 1.5Mbps. This network serves the of our network, as explained above, the proxy server
approximately four thousand cadets, the faculty and should have retrieved a large number of cached
staff of the institution, plus the various staff agencies of documents and delivered these at close to USMA
the military post. Figure 1 illustrates the layout and network speeds (100 Mbps around the backbone and
size of the USMA network. Average utilization is 15- generally 10 Mbps to the user). Unfortunately, this did

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not happen. As an example, from 0010 hrs to 1945 hrs
on 17 December 1997, the proxy server accepted
290,000 server requests. It only served 12,000
documents from its cache. This is a 4% hit ratio. We
were expecting about a 20% hit ratio.
The factor that we failed to consider is that many
web sites, including www.microsoft.com, are using
dynamic Web pages and dynamic HTML to create their
documents. Dynamic Web pages refer to Web content
that changes each time it is viewed. For example, the
same URL could result in a different page depending on
any number of parameters, such as: geographic location
of the reader, time of day, previous pages viewed by the
reader, or profile of the reader. There are already many
languages and technologies for producing dynamic
HTML, including CGI scripts, Server-Side Includes,
cookies, Java, JavaScript, and ActiveX. It appears that
the number of dynamic Web pages will increase,
especially with the advent of Dynamic HTML.
Dynamic HTML are new HTML extensions that will
enable a Web page to react to user input without
sending requests to the Web server. Microsoft and
Netscape have submitted competing Dynamic HTML
proposals to W3C, which must now hammer out the
final specification [7].
So, with Dynamic Web pages every time you go to
the site, you may get a different page. It may be mostly
the same information as the last time you visited the
site, but the page is created on the fly. The proxy server
can not cache this kind of web page in the normal way.
Instead, the proxy server acts as a middleman. It sends
a request to the distance Web server, copies the
documents to the proxy server hard drive and then
delivers the documents to the user. This had two
effects: 1. There were very few documents stored in
cache. Only, the static HTML documents. 2. For the
dynamic Web pages, the proxy server was actually
slowing down access time with the coping and updating
of the documents.
proxy servers. We conducted a 14-day experiment
and channeled users through a proxy server if they
wanted to access www.microsoft.com, a major Web
site. Based on previous trade reports, we expected
about a 20% hit ratio. Instead, our hit ratio was one
fifth of this expectation. We traced the cause to the
increased use of dynamic Web pages. ,While the growth
of the Web was not the major factor, it appears that as
the Web has grown, it has and is evolving from a static
to a dynamic information repository. Under this
environment, the role of the proxy server will decrease
as it less able to delivery performance enhancements.
Obviously, product redesign is in order.
References:
[ l ] Computerworld, April 21, 1997 v31 n16 p16(1)
Proxy servers gain user appeal Laura DiDio.
[2] Computerworld, Nov 17, 1997 v31 n46 p6(1)
Planning blunts Web traffic spikes. Sharon Machlis.
[3] Computerworld, Jan 26, 1998 v32 n4 p47(2) Web-
caching servers cut network costs. Bob Wallace.
[4] Jeffery, C.L.; Das, S.R.; Bernal, G.S. Proxy-sharing
proxy servers. 7-10 May 1996. Proceedings of
COM’96. First Annual Conference on Emerging
Technologies and Applications in Communications.
[5] Ki Dong Nam; Hyeun Tae Lee. Design of a virtual
server for service interworking over heterogeneous
networks. 20-22 Aug. 1997. 1997 IEEE Pacific Rim
Conference on Communications, Computers and Signal
Processing, PACRIM. 10 Years Networking the Pacific.
[6] Law, K.L.E.; Nandy, B.; Chapman, A. A scalable
and distributed WWW proxy system. 3-6 June 1997.
Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on
Multimedia Computing and Systems.
[7] http://www.pcwehouedia.coni/dynamic HTML.htm
[8] http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uWyr2/Figl.htm.

Conclusion
For this experiment, we set out to see if the growth
of the Web had changed the role and performance of

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