Comparing the Performance of CERN's httpd and Squid

For many enterprises, web proxies have become a performance critical resource for managing http traffic which at some sites currently doubles every six months. We compare the performance of two popular web proxies, "httpd" and "Squid" at heavy real workloads. In spite of their different architectures and their different complexity, we found that their performance does not differ significantly. This position paper gives an overview of our results which we present in more detail in [5]. The proxies are evaluated on their resource requirements (CPU, memory, and disk I/O), and how these requirements scale with load. The request service time and hit rate are used to evaluate the quality of service each provides. 1 Introduction While the performance of web proxies has been analyzed based on synthetic workloads, little is known about their performance on real workloads. In this paper we present the performance of two widely used public domain web proxies under real workload conditions for bo..