Web Caching

Products

By now you should have a pretty good view of the web caching landscape. In the rest of this book, we’ll explore many of the topics of this chapter in much greater detail, so you can fully comprehend all the issues involved. When you finish this book, you’ll be able to design and operate a web cache for your environment. You might even think about writing your own software. But since I’m sure most of you have other responsibilities, you’ll probably want to use an existing product. Following is a list of caching products that are currently available, many of which are mentioned throughout this book:

Squid, http://www.squid-cache.org

Squid is an open source software package that runs on a wide range of Unix platforms. There has also been some recent success in porting Squid to Windows NT. As with most free software, users receive technical support from a public mailing list. Squid was originally derived from the Harvest project in 1996.

Netscape Proxy Server, http://home.netscape.com/proxy/v3.5/index.html

The Netscape Proxy Server was the first caching proxy product available. The lead developer, Ari Luotonen, also worked extensively on the CERN HTTP server during the Web’s formative years in 1993 and 1994. Netscape’s Proxy runs on a handful of Unix systems, as well as Windows NT.

Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server, http://www.microsoft.com/isaserver/

Microsoft currently has two caching proxy products available. The older Proxy Server runs on Windows ...