Tuning

You probably don't need to do this! You can easily make localProxy behave much worse by tinkering. But if you feel you must ...

If it's configured properly, the speed will be entirely dependent on your fastest ISP's proxy speed and your network connection. There's nothing you can do about that, but ... If localProxy is not configured properly, or you have many proxies in the configuration, it will take some time to learn the fastest strategies and proxies to use. It takes localProxy a few requests using each one of those proxies to find the best ones to use. The ones which don't work at all, or are very slow will slow you down a lot in the early stages (first 5-10 minutes of browsing, say). How to fix this?
Here are some tips:
  1. In the following, note that you may temporarily disable any proxy (or whole commStrat) in the configuration by selecting the proxy in the GUI and checking the 'this host is disabled' checkbox. Or more permanently, by adding a 'isEnabled' tag with a zero value in the user configuration. This enables you to remove them from the running configuration, but save them in the configuration file, for later repeat testing until you are sure they need to be removed permanently. Disabling complete commStrats may be useful when unsure whether a particular commStrat is successful or not. Disabling 'all' and then reenabling a particular service, commStrat, layer 0 host and (for commStrat 1) layer 1 host is a very good way to examine the behaviour of a particular proxy in a particular mode.
  2. For the first 5 minutes, say, surf to pages with a lot of components, maybe click the 'train me' button a few times. A page full of thumbnail pictures will do the same thing and might be more interesting to look at too :-). If a lot of the page components fail to load, refreshing the page is an easy way to exercise localProxy a bit more. Be aware that once things are cached in your browser, surfing to that page again no longer exercises localProxy much, unless the page has changed (like CNN does often).
  3. Note any error messages in the command window from localProxy (depending on the version, you may need to bump up the debug level to see some of these)
  4. Watch the speeds in the log window. Remove the very slow proxies by disabling them in your user configuration - leave at least one local and one remote though! A semi-automated way to do this (for layer 0 proxies) is to run statProxy on the config, and merge the results back into the config once a week, or so:
    perl statProxy.pl -t all -l config-User0.xml > test.out
    perl mergeHosts.pl test.out config-User0.xml
  5. Remember that any given proxy may be down or slow today, but better tomorrow, so keep retrying the ones you remove until you're sure they are really dead. Keep a copy of the original configuration file to go back to occasionally. OTOH, you may have many and wish to keep only the good, reliable ones.
  6. If your remote proxies are all bad, or you want to try new ones, get a new hosts.zip from the proxyTools CVS at sourceForge. LP will unzip and use it as soon as you 'Start services'.
  7. Be sure to get the syntax correct when you edit the configuration file. Refer to the original one for this. Better - use mergeHosts to update it all the time.