Last night I found an SSL-ready version of the latest Apache build 2.2.3 and it has greatly improved the data rendering on my site since I implemented it. I have seen significant improvement, particularly in the speed at which it compresses the HTML as well as how fast it renders encrypted pages. I’ve been trying for quite a while to get that version going as my proxy server, but had many obstacles (such as Mod files that weren’t available for it yet). But this version (which I obtained from www.apachelounge.com) took care of all that for me. I think the most significant improvement though as a proxy server is the updates made to the gzip compression technology. On Apache 2.0.55 (which is what I was running before) I had a lot of issues where pages would hang in the process of being compressed. And if you refreshed the page, it would cause to hang in definitely (particularly in Firefox). Also, they seem to have really improved it’s capability, such as adding a web proxy load balancer where you can setup identical web servers behind it and load balance between each server for maximum up time. It’s really quite incredible how versatile this server is … and it’s free. Man open source rocks! Yes I’m a nerd.