The Design and Implementation of Visual Assistance to Simplify the Management Work of Proxy Server

Abstract

With the rapidly growth of WWW server which increases both network traffic and server load, User perceived latency increased in retrieving web pages. Although bandwidth expansion can solve this problem, it is an expensive strategy trying to scale network bandwidth or server capacity to keep up with client demand. Caching proxy has been proven a useful technique for reducing end-tiger-experienced latency on the web. Caching is effective because many web documents are requested more than once. It is based on established techniques used for improving the performance of distributed file system.
A caching proxy has quite a few difficult jobs to deal with. It is difficult for people to effectively and efficiently do the maintenance work needless of mentioning the performance tuning work. In this paper, we study the widely used proxy server-Squid [I], which suffers from lacking well-designed interface to assist the managel11ent work of proxy server. It motivates us to design and implement friendly interfaces to simplify the management work. On the other hand, these interfaces also help to support the study or evaluation work of the proxy server.
We study the public domain Squid proxy server first to find out what we could take advantage of. Then, we design and implement three visual interfaces to facilitate the proxy server with different features and capabilities. To support the visualized assistant, we integrate the MRTG [3] with these interfaces. These three interfaces are the SNMP agent, the interception of the run-time internal object and the instantaneously analysis of the log file. Each approach has its own limitation and fitness for specific circumstance or objective. Section 2 describes the SNMP agent to assist the monitoring work of the proxy server. Section 3 explains how to intercept the run-time internal object of Squid. Section 4 describes the simultaneously parsing of the access log file. We continue to discuss the circumstance to apply one of the alternative choices. Finally, we point out the future work to be continued.