Austin Lane

Do you get tired of sitting and waiting for a website to load? Do you click a link, get up and get a cup of coffee, and hope that when you get back to your desk that the next page has loaded? If you have a broadband connection and are getting tired of all this waiting, there may be a solution that does not change your monthly DSL or T1 bill.

There is a solution out there that will make your internet connection appear to operate much faster. This solution is a proxy server, and more specifically a caching proxy server. A caching proxy server can either be a piece of software or a hardware device that sits on your network or one of your servers. This piece of software will intercept each request that your browser makes for a website, and will check to see if it has the information in its cache. If the file is in its cache, it does not ask the website’s server for the file, but sends it back to your browser directly from the cache. This speeds up your browsing experience in most cases. However, if this is the first time anyone that is using the Caching Proxy Server has ever been to this website, then it will have not affect on the amount of time it takes to load the website.

Another feature of Proxy servers is that it can allow employers to track how much bandwidth they are using and what websites their employees are visiting. This can be use for planning future growth of bandwidth as well as monitoring what users are visiting on the internet. There are several different products available that allow varying degrees of granularity of reporting of what users visit on the Internet. Some lump all users together and give a company-wide view of the data. Others can narrow it down to what computer was being used, what user was logged in to the computer, and how long the user was viewing the website before they navigated away from the site. This information can be helpful when having to terminate an employee for visiting pornographic or illegal websites, as it gives you hard evidence about what happened. The reporting can also tell you how much bandwidth, or data each user downloads. This information can greatly help the IT department adjust the network so that everything is running smoothly and is not overrun with users listening to streaming radio.

Two of the most popular caching proxy servers are Microsoft’s Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2006 and the Squid Proxy server.

If you would like more information about implementing proxy servers, please contact Austin Lane Technologies, Inc.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 18th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Austin Lane, Browsers, Email, Internet, Jeff's Tech Tip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.