Proxy cache server

How the proxy cache works

We run the proxy cache server on one of our machines here at SWCP. You tell your browser to use "proxies", and set it up to use our proxy cache server. Then when you access a web page, your browser will contact our proxy server to get the page instead of contacting the remote site directly. If someone else has visited the same site recently, then the proxy server will have cached the information from that site and will transfer it to you directly, saving the time and network bandwidth that would have been required to retrieve the pages a second time.

The proxy cache is pretty smart about what objects it should and shouldn't cache. For example, the results of a cgi-bin query (search results at Altavista for example) would not be cached. Only relatively static items are cached: plain HTML pages, images, etc.

The cache also does a pretty good job of knowing when to throw away the cached data and reload the object from the original source. For example, if you hit the Reload button in your browser, the cache will refetch the data from the source.

If you're interested in technical details, we're using the Squid Internet Object Cache. Their home page has lots of information about how it works.

Configuration Information

Proxy Server Address	squid.swcp.com
Proxy Server Port	3128
Netscape configuration URL	http://www.swcp.com/proxy.pac

Setting up Proxy service

Firefox

In Preferences -> Advanced -> Network -> in the connection section, press "Settings". You can set up manual proxies for any or all of the protocols listed, HTTP (web), SSL (encrypted web), FTP (file transfer), Gopher (Information service), or SOCKS, or you can enter http://www.swcp.com/proxy.pac as the automatic proxy configuration URL.