Improving HTTP caching proxy performance with TCP Tap

David Maltz, Pravin Bhagwat
Application layer proxies are an extremely popular method for adding new services to existing network applications.  They provide backwards compatibility, centralized administration, and the convenience of the application layer programming environment. Since proxies act as traffic concentrators, serving multiple clients at the same time, during peak load periods they often become performance bottlenecks. In this paper we present an extension of the TCP Splice technique called  TCP Tap that promises to dramatically improve the performance of a HTTP caching proxy, just as TCP Splice doubled the throughput of an application layer firewall proxy. 
 
Paper (gzipped postscript)