I've just submitted a bug to bugzilla [6816] reporting the very poor performance of the inbuilt web proxy of SME server - I've reported it against 8.0beta5 because my own server is running that version, but the problems also apply to various version 7 distributions. The problems I'm seeing are...
On workstations running both Windows XP and Windows 7 a large number of perfectly ordinary pages do not work properly, in particular secure pages such as signing in to 'My eBay' simply fail to load. The failure behaviour varies with the web browser in use but the pages do not work properly in any of them.
Other examples include Windows 7 failing to find drivers with its autoconfiguration function - bypassing the SME server by connecting directly to the broadband router cures this problem instantly.
Buying goods and using Paypal as the payment system also fails - the last event in the sequence should be a return to the vendor's page to confirm the transaction and this simply fails to happen and gives an 'unable to display the page' report.
Filling in forms online is also all but impossible - a good example is
http://opf.lpinsure.co.uk/lpiprop/ which should bring up the opening page and login of an insurance proposal form which has multiple pages. Depending on the browser in use, the first page either doesn't load, or the sign-in fails to function, or it functions but the pages take minutes to load.
The proxy is also generally very slow compared to direct connection to the router.
I could list dozens and dozens of similar problems across various machines running SME 7 and 8.0beta5. I also suspect, but cannot prove, that the problem has to do with Java functionality and that recent Java updates have made it much worse
Reconfiguring the server to 'Server only' and connecting the network workstations direct to the broadband router cures these problems competely.
In summary, I believe the web-proxy has reached the stage where it is completely unuseable and makes it all but impossible to use the full Server and Gateway configuration of SME server. The worst bit of the lot is that I was totally unable to post this message or enter the bug in bugzilla until I bypassed the web proxy of my own server.
Ed Form