Gael Marziou wrote:
Can anyone point me to some to some study that compares the performance of apache configured as a reverse proxy versus direct connection to the remote backend web server?
I know my question may be too vague but I 'd like to get an order of magnitude and also to know what can be tuned to improve the reverse proxy performance.
The connection through a reverse proxy will always be slightly slower than a direct connection - assuming no caching is in place. How slightly is dependant on the speed of the reverse proxy machine, and the speed of the networks between reverse proxy and backend server.
If there is caching in place, then the performance will depend entirely on the type of data you're serving (whether it's cacheable or not), and the speed of your backend.
It's really difficult to benchmark this kind of thing, as there is no "standard" data type or "standard" machine.
The proxy is very lightweight, significantly more so than most interactive backends (web applications, php, asp, etc). The best way to test is is set up a test system and see for yourself in your environment.
Regards, Graham --
