Author(s)

Olatunde Abiona¹, Adeniran Oluwaranti², Ayodeji Oluwatope², Surura Bello², Clement Onime³, Mistura Sanni², Lawrence Kehinde⁴

¹Department of Computer Information Systems, Indiana University Northwest, Garry, USA.
²Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria.
³Information and Communication Technology Section, Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy.
⁴Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria.

The total reliance on internet connectivity and World Wide Web (WWW) based services is forcing many organizations to look for alternative solutions for providing adequate access and response time to the demand of their ever increasing users. A typical solution is to increase the bandwidth; this can be achieved with additional cost, but this solution does not scale nor decrease users perceived response time. Another concern is the security of their network. An alternative scalable solution is to deploy a proxy server to provide adequate access and improve response time as well as provide some level of security for clients using the network. While some studies have reported performance increase due to the use of proxy servers, one study has reported performance decrease due to proxy server. We then conducted a six-month proxy server experiment. During this period, we collected access logs from three different proxy servers and analyzed these logs with Webalizer a web server log file analysis program. After a few years, in September 2010, we collected log files from another proxy server, analyzed the logs using Webalizer and compared our results. The result of the analysis showed that the hit rate of the proxy servers ranged between 21% - 39% and over 70% of web pages were dynamic. Furthermore clients accessing the internet through a proxy server are more secured. We then conclude that although the nature of the web is changing, the proxy server is still capable of improving performance by decreasing response time perceived by web clients and improved network security.

Proxy Server, Network Security, Hit Ratio, Webalizer, Proxy Log Analysis

Abiona, O. , Oluwaranti, A. , Oluwatope, A. , Bello, S. , Onime, C. , Sanni, M. and Kehinde, L. (2014) Proxy Server Experiment and Network Security with Changing Nature of the Web. International Journal of Communications, Network and System Sciences, 7, 519-528. doi: 10.4236/ijcns.2014.712052.