On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 07:19:09PM +0200, Graham Leggett wrote:
> 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.
We use modproxy(without cache) for about 30 backend webservers, the whole
traffic is about 10 million hits/month , and we use a pentium 2 / 400MhZ with
750MB ram as reverse proxy, but its 15min load average during working hour is
only about 0.05 , so the cpu is not a bottleneck or modproxy is just very
fast.
regards,
cahya
