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.

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?

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?