Squid (software)

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Squid

Initial release	July 1996
Stable release	3.1.12 / 2.7.STABLE9 / April 4, 2011; 44 days ago (2011-04-04) / March 17, 2010; 13 months ago (2010-03-17)
Written in	C/C++ (Squid 3)
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	web cache, proxy server
License	GNU General Public License
Website	http://www.squid-cache.org

Squid is a proxy server and web cache daemon. It has a wide variety of uses, from speeding up a web server by caching repeated requests; to caching web, DNS and other computer network lookups for a group of people sharing network resources; to aiding security by filtering traffic. Although primarily used for HTTP and FTP, Squid includes limited support for several other protocols including TLS, SSL, Internet Gopher and HTTPS.

Squid was originally designed to run on Unix-like systems, but also runs well on Windows-based systems. Released under the GNU General Public License, Squid is free software.

1 History
2 Web proxy
3 Reverse proxy
4 Media-range limitations
5 Supported platforms
6 Performance
7 Recent development
8 See also
9 References
10 Further reading
11 External links

History

Squid was originally developed by Duane Wessels as the Harvest object cache, part of the Harvest project at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Further work on the program was completed at the University of California, San Diego and funded via two grants from the National Science Foundation. Duane Wessels forked the "last pre-commercial version of Harvest" and renamed it to Squid to avoid confusion with the commercial fork called Cached 2.0, which became NetCache. Squid version 1.0.0 was released in July 1996.

Squid is now developed almost exclusively through volunteer efforts.

Web proxy

Caching is a way to store requested Internet objects (e.g. data like web pages) available via the HTTP, FTP, and Gopher protocols on a system closer to the requesting site. Web browsers can then use the local Squid cache as a proxy HTTP server, reducing access time as well as bandwidth consumption. This is often useful for Internet service providers to increase speed to their customers, and LANs that share an Internet connection. Because it is also a proxy (i.e. it behaves like a client on behalf of the real client), it can provide some anonymity and security. However, it also can introduce significant privacy concerns as it can log a lot of data including URLs requested, the exact date and time, the name and version of the requester's web browser and operating system, and the referrer.

A client program (e.g. browser) either has to specify explicitly the proxy server it wants to use (typical for ISP customers), or it could be using a proxy without any extra configuration: “transparent caching”, in which case all outgoing HTTP requests are intercepted by Squid and all responses are cached. The latter is typically a corporate set-up (all clients are on the same LAN) and often introduces the privacy concerns mentioned above.

Squid has some features that can help anonymize connections, such as disabling or changing specific header fields in a client's HTTP requests. Whether these are set, and what they are set to do, is up to the person who controls the computer running Squid. People requesting pages through a network which transparently uses Squid may not know whether this information is being logged. Within UK organisations at least, users should be informed if computers or internet connections are being monitored.

Reverse proxy

The above setup—caching the contents of an unlimited number of webservers for a limited number of clients—is the classical one. Another setup is “reverse proxy” or “webserver acceleration” (using http_port 80 accel vhost). In this mode, the cache serves an unlimited number of clients for a limited number of—or just one—web servers.

As an example, if slow.example.com is a “real” web server, and www.example.com is the Squid cache server that “accelerates” it, the first time any page is requested from www.example.com, the cache server would get the actual page from slow.example.com, but later requests would get the stored copy directly from the accel

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