We performed our tests using a pair of Intel-based systems running the proxy code and a Sun SparcStation providing content. Specifically, the client system was a Pentium 133Mhz based machine with 32MB of RAM, running BSDI's BSD/OS v2.1. (Our proxy code is very portable across Unix platforms and currently compiles without any change on SunOS, Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD and BSD/OS. Its main system dependencies are BSD sockets and vdelta so we expect it should be easily portable to any system that has BSD sockets and some kind of difference library that supports binary files.) It was connected using an AT&T Paradyne Comsphere 3820Plus modem at 28.8 Kbps to a dial-in server on the AT&T corporate network. The server proxy ran on an identical machine in the AT&T network one hop away from the dial-in server. The server connected to an HTTP daemon (htd, an internally developed server) on a uniprocessor SparcStation 20 on the same Ethernet segment as the server proxy. This provided relatively fine-grained control over the latency between the server proxy and the content provider.
The ``browser'' was a simple C program that fetched a series of URLs specified in a control file by communicating with the client proxy, which also ran on the client machine. The ``browser'' did not do any caching.