Web Design Specialists. |
What is an 'Proxy Server'?
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Proxy servers have two main purposes:
Improve Performance:
Proxy servers can dramatically improve
performance for groups of users. This is because it saves the results of all
requests for a certain amount of time. Consider the case where both user
X and user Y access the World Wide Web through a proxy server. First
user X requests a certain Web page, which we'll call Page 1. Sometime
later, user Y requests the same page. Instead of forwarding the request to
the Web server where Page 1 resides, which can be a time-consuming
operation, the proxy server simply returns the Page 1 that it already
fetched for user X. Since the proxy server is often on the same network as
the user, this is a much faster operation. Real proxy servers support
hundreds or thousands of users. The major online services such as
Compuserve and America Online, for example, employ an array of proxy
servers.
Filter Requests:
Proxy servers can also be used to filter requests. For
example, a company might use a proxy server to prevent its employees
from accessing a specific set of Web sites.
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