Tinyproxy on WRT54GS

I installed Tinyproxy 1.6.3 on my LinkSys WRT54GS router today. Following are some installation notes and comments about Tinyproxy.

My router currently runs the White Russian RC5 release of the OpenWrt Linux distribution. Tinyproxy is not yet an officially supported OpenWrt package. Rather, it is part of the “backports” package repository. To install Tinyproxy, I first had to add the backports repository to my repository list by adding the following line to my /etc/ipkg.conf file:

src backports http://downloads.openwrt.org/backports/rc5

After adding that line, I ran ipkg update to add the backport packages to my list of packages. To confirm that Tinyproxy was in the list, I ran ipkg list and looked for tinyproxy in the output. Finally, to install Tinyproxy, I ran ipkg install tinyproxy.

The installer put a tinyproxy init script in /etc/init.d. You can either run Tinyproxy manually with /etc/init.d/tinyproxy start or you can run it automatically by renaming it something like S50tinyproxy and rebooting.

Once I got Tinyproxy running, I pointed my browser at it and started surfing. One thing I noticed right away is that Tinyproxy was SLOW for sites with lots of graphics. For example, on average it took about 30 seconds to load http://tsn.ca.

Of course, the question was “Is Tinyproxy slow because of the hardware (WRT54GS) or the software (Tinyproxy)?”

To answer this question, I ran both Squid and Tinyproxy on a P3-350 with 256 MB of RAM, running CentOS 4. On average, Squid took about 9 seconds to load http://tsn.ca and Tinyproxy took about 10 seconds. Therefore, I concluded that Tinyproxy’s slow performance on the WRT54GS was due to the hardware.

For websites with mostly text, Tinyproxy’s performance on the WRT54GS was certainly acceptable. For example, search results from Google appeared almost instantly.