What is the primary function of a reverse proxy?

The primary function of a reverse proxy is to act as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from servers. While it can offer benefits such as optimizing and compressing content to enhance loading speeds, this is not its singular or main purpose.

The role of a reverse proxy involves various responsibilities, including load balancing, caching, SSL termination, and maintaining security. By caching content and compressing data, a reverse proxy can indeed improve load times by reducing the amount of data that needs to be transferred from the server to the client.

However, a reverse proxy primarily manages requests on behalf of a backend server. It receives client requests, forwards them to the appropriate server, and sends the server's response back to the client. This allows it to handle tasks like load balancing different servers, providing an additional layer of security, and improving overall reliability and performance.

In this context, while optimizing and compressing content is beneficial, it is part of a broader set of functionalities rather than the essential primary function of a reverse proxy, which focuses on managing the communication between clients and servers.