The primary focus of this paper is the design of efficient algorithm for the calculation of solution to the placement of proxies for performance optimization in hierarchical reliable multicast (HRM). Proxy is introduced to localize feedback and retransmission, and therefore significantly depress traffic redundancy and reduce latency. Placement of proxies is a key issue in HRM. This paper theoretically analyzes the performance improvement made by placement of proxies and presents a new approach to optimal partition of a subtree for performance optimization in the placement of a single proxy. Based on this approach, we propose a new algorithm, designed in a greedy fashion. We experimentally compare our new algorithm with several existing heuristic algorithms, and observe that it outperforms in the tradeoff between performance and complexity.