Proxy Server

In the last post i told you about the servers and their installation.In this post i am going to tell you one of the most common type of server that is Proxy server.Now a days the use of proxy servers are increased to a great extent.

Proxy Servers are the servers that are used to handle the requests of clients and after handling the requests,it pass requests to the other servers.First of all these severs tries itself to handle the requests,and if it is not possible then it pass requests to the other servers.
Generally proxy servers are used mainly for two purposes first one is to improve the performance for group of users.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.For ex:Suppose any client requests any web page then it first search on its own cache,if it finds the page, it returns it to the user without needing to forward the request to the Internet. If the page is not in the cache, the proxy server, acting as a client on behalf of the user, uses one of its own IP addresses to request the page from the server out on the Internet.In this way the performance of the whole network can be increased.Today the most common example where the proxy servers are used more frequently are the online services such as America Online, MSN and Yahoo.

Second purpose of using the proxy servers is to filter the client requests.For ex: A company can use proxy server to limit its employees from using some specific set of websites.For the users proxy servers are invisible,all the requests and their return responses are addressed directly to the internet server.