Performance impact of proxies in data intensive client-server applications

Large client-server data intensive applications can place high demands on system and network resources. This is especially true when the connection between the client and server spans a wide-area internet link. In this paper, we describe our experience changing the typical client-server architecture for a class of data intensive applications. We show that given sufficient common interest among multiple clients, our enhancements reduce the response time per-client, the response-time variation and the amount of data sent across the wide-area link. In addition, we also see a reduction in server utilization which helps to improve server scalability.