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I live in Turkey and am part of a group planning to build a WiFi-based ISP to service my home town, as we believe it will be easier to connect all the sub-villages that are not close to our town center wirelessly. During our research about the required equipment for this project, we've read about caching proxy servers that store data from frequently visited websites so that content can be downloaded from the cache proxy server rather than going over our back-haul to the internet and consuming that bandwidth.

We expect that our users will be highly trafficking popular social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as data and video content farms, online banking websites and many other websites that use https. From all I have read about the subject, we won't be able to cache this content, so I feel like maybe we should give up the search for using a caching proxy server.

In our case, does it make sense to consider using a caching proxy server, considering that we expect most of our traffic to be over https? Will we be able to save significant bandwidth over our back-haul using this technology, or not?

Desperatuss0ccus
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Fatih Kesova
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  • Please also read [this question and answers](http://serverfault.com/q/615649/126632), which covers a similar scenario. The answers will also mostly apply to your proposed service. – Michael Hampton Mar 10 '16 at 02:28
  • You may be better off making arrangements with leading content networks to get their frontends deployed directly on your network. – kasperd Mar 11 '16 at 16:16
  • @kasperd Will they do that for a very small rural ISP? My impression was that you had to be quite large before they would consider that. – Michael Hampton Mar 12 '16 at 04:55
  • @MichaelHampton I don't know, and it probably differs among content providers. – kasperd Mar 12 '16 at 08:41
  • @MichaelHampton I found a page where Google say [1Gbps](https://peering.google.com/#/learn-more/faq) at peak. The wording sounds like it is a guideline rather than a hard limit. I don't know if the OP has 1Gbps of YouTube traffic at peak. – kasperd Mar 12 '16 at 09:13

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You are right: the caching proxy gives diminishing returns nowadays.

Depending on the browsing patterns it might or might not make sense, but most likely it doesn't. If you look top accessed developed world sites, which generate most traffic, they are definitely behind SSL and caching proxy cannot know (and cache) what goes in the wire.

If you have enough time and resources in hands and what to figure out the exact number, the way to find out is to attach a network monitor and see what part of the traffic is HTTP and what other protocols. The caching proxy comes with some cost (installation, maintenance, resolving proxy issues) and you can (somehow) estimate this and compare this to the price of the traffic.

Mikko Ohtamaa
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