Squid: A caching proxy for the Web

Squid is a caching proxy for the Web supporting HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and more. It reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages. Squid has extensive access controls and makes a great server accelerator. It runs on most available operating systems, including Windows and is licensed under the GNU GPL. Squid is used by hundreds of Internet Providers world-wide to provide their users with the best possible web access. Squid optimises the data flow between client and server to improve performance and caches frequently-used content to save bandwidth. Squid can also route content requests to servers in a wide variety of ways to build cache server hierarchies which optimise network throughput.

Thousands of web-sites around the Internet use Squid to drastically increase their content delivery. Squid can reduce your server load and improve delivery speeds to clients. Squid can also be used to deliver content from around the world – copying only the content being used, rather than inefficiently copying everything. Finally, Squid’s advanced content routing configuration allows you to build content clusters to route and load balance requests via a variety of web servers.

[The Squid systems] are currently running at a hit-rate of approximately 75%, effectively quadrupling the capacity of the Apache servers behind them. This is particularly noticeable when a large surge of traffic arrives directed to a particular page via a web link from another site, as the caching efficiency for that page will be nearly 100%. – Wikimedia Deployment Information.

Website: http://www.squid-cache.org/