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Does it work? Caching Proxy to speed up browsing

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justice:
I was thinking I could save a lot of bandwidth and speed up browsing at the same time if I set up a local disk cache proxy. In this day an age of broadband for many people, will this still speed up things? Does it work a lot better than the modern browser's own cache? Or is it a waste of resources and disk space?

I'm using FreeProxy at the moment which does disk caching but I would like to see some statistics to see how much bandwidth is saved and how many requests %-wise are cached.

Josh:
Personally, if you set your disk cache to a high amount, and then run a dns caching only server, you would see the same benefits. Treewalk offers a free caching dns server which works really well (www.ntcanuck.com). Check it out. Its great!

justice:
In the meantime I have tried Google Webaccelerator but although it tells you what proxy info to put in for it to work under Opera, it doesn't accelerate -- only in Firefox and IE.

Thanks for the suggestion I will try treewalk.

f0dder:
DNS cache is great, especially when you're maxxing out your bandwidth - I was surprised by how much perceived improvement I got for such a simple thing.

Caching proxy, I don't really know. A lot of things are dynamic these days (forums, etc. yadda yadda), and thus pretty hard to cache. I used to run a squid caching proxy when I still lived with my mum, and I dunno how much effect it had. When on even a moderately slow ADSL line, the biggest bottleneck I feel is when a browser/whatever needs to make a new connection to a server, rather than re-using a persistant connection.

Lashiec:
A caching proxy would be useful in a big organization. For single users at home, I don't think it'll bring any benefit in speed. In reality, if you think about it, it's mostly like the browser cache, so basically you're duplicating efforts. It reminds of RAM disks.

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