Does it work? Caching Proxy to speed up browsing

[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.

[skywalka]

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.

-Lashiec (May 29, 2007, 01:20 PM)

Agreed.  I was going to say how could it be better than the browser's cache?

[f0dder]

Agreed.  I was going to say how could it be better than the browser's cache?

-skywalka (August 12, 2007, 09:16 AM)

For a company or even an ISP, it can be beneficial, though... a LAN *is* faster than most internet connections, even if they're fast

[nontroppo]

A local proxy could be "better" than a browsers cache in the sense that you could have more control in how to overdies remote server cache directives. Investing lots of tweak time may save you fractions of a second per web site ;-)

I'd stick with the browser cache. With regard to the DNS cache, what does more than the built-in DNS cache of the OS -- is it simply more persistent?