Here’s the lowdown on the Perforce Proxy (aka P4P):
– You can use *any* version of it. Just use whatever the most recent one is on perforce.com
– It’s as simple as you might hope. Install it, make it run all the time, point it at your main perforce instance, and then have all your p4 clients just point at the proxy instead of the main perforce server.
– Yeah, having all the clients point at a p4 proxy instance instead of the main perforce server means you can lock down your perforce server better.
– The proxies cache all the big files and pass along all the commands from the client to the main perforce server. All the proxy does is make it so the main server doesn’t have to read and transfer the big files.
– If you run a p4 proxy on your own computer, it means your computer is storing all the versioned files locally, so when you switch between branches or streams, you don’t have to wait for the big files to transfer from the main perforce server. Yes, it’s great for VPN connections.
– You can’t point a p4 proxy at a p4 proxy 🙂 It says something about a version not being new enough, at least in my brief tests.
– P4 Proxy is easiest to install on Windows. Pretty no-brainer stuff. Really, the installer is an .msi that includes the p4 server and client. You can install just the proxy though, so no worries.
– P4 Proxy just uses disk space. CPU and memory is negligible.
– If you have people in all kinds of locations, just have them set up a p4 proxy instance in a relatively secure manner on their own computer (or if they’re fancy, in some VM in their own environment).
– If you go fancier that a P4 proxy, you’re looking at setting up some perforce edge and read-or-whatever replicas. Just don’t go there…. unless you’re HUGE and you have people (not “person”) in your dedicated IT infrastructure team.
Download it here:
https://www.perforce.com/downloads/helix-proxy-server-p4p