Google Networking Best Practices for Large Deployments - Manual (Page 24)

24 Networking Best Practices for Large Deployments
Network Routing Tools
• A variety of useful tools are available to generate detailed data regarding your Internet
connection performance on the external website
Measurement Lab . You can use these
tools to measure your overall Internet access performance.
• The site PeeringDB is a large worldwide public database with information about peering
networks.
Proxy Servers
When planning your proxy server setup for Google Apps users, keep in mind the following best
practices:
• Avoid routing Google Apps data through a proxy that inspects the content of HTTP traffic,
since this will reduce performance, and a great deal of Google Apps content is dynamic or
encrypted.
• Keep your proxy servers in a location that is close to your users and their Internet egress
point, in terms of both geography and network topology.
• If you need to filter web traffic by URI, consider using a PAC configuration file on the
client’s desktop, since URIs in encrypted HTTP traffic are not visible to the proxy.
• If you are using a proxy server that supports SSL Terminations, you can set up your proxy
server to inspect Google Apps content while relaying the secure connection.
Proxy Server Configuration
We recommend that you do not route Google Apps traffic through a proxy server. If you decide
to send Google Apps traffic through your proxy, look for settings on your proxy server that
might disrupt Google Apps traffic.
Look for configurations and settings that include the following conditions:
• Content filters that might mark Google-related traffic as prohibited
• Settings that can lower the total amount of possible concurrent connections/sec per client
• Exceptionally long or short SSL time-outs (The default setting is recommended)
• Outdated firmware versions
• SSL Inspection without hardware acceleration
If you choose to use a proxy server in conjunction with Google Apps, keep your proxy server
as close to the client as possible, in terms of both geography and network topology. Your users
will have a better experience if you minimize both the number of network hops and the round
trip time between your users, the proxy server, and the Internet.