What is Squid?
January 4th, 2008 . by admin
The following intro is compiled from various excerpts from The Squid Wiki
What is Squid?
Squid is a high-performance proxy caching server for web clients, supporting FTP, gopher, and HTTP data objects. Squid handles all requests in a single, non-blocking, I/O-driven process.
Squid keeps meta data and especially hot objects cached in RAM, caches DNS lookups, supports non-blocking DNS lookups, and implements negative caching of failed requests.
Squid supports SSL, extensive access controls, and full request logging. By using the lightweight Internet Cache Protocol, Squid caches can be arranged in a hierarchy or mesh for additional bandwidth savings.
Squid consists of a main server program squid, an optional Domain Name System lookup program dnsserver (Squid nowadays implements the DNS protocol on its own by default), some optional programs for rewriting requests and performing authentication, and some management and client tools.
Squid is originally derived from the ARPA-funded Harvest project. Since then it has gone through many changes and has many new features.
What is Internet object caching?
Internet object caching is a way to store requested Internet objects (i.e., data available via the HTTP, FTP, and gopher protocols) on a system closer to the requesting site than to the source. Web browsers can then use the local Squid cache as a proxy HTTP server, reducing access time as well as bandwidth consumption.
What Operating Systems does Squid support?
The software is designed to operate on any modern system, and is known to work on at least the following platforms:
- Linux
- FreeBSD
- NetBSD
- OpenBSD
- BSDI
- Mac OS/X
- OSF/Digital Unix/Tru64
- IRIX
- SunOS/Solaris
- NeXTStep
- SCO Unix
- AIX
- HP-UX
- Microsoft Windows Cygwin and MinGW
- OS/2
If you’re curious about what is the best OS to run Squid, see BestOsForSquid.
Does Squid run on Windows ?
Recent versions of Squid will compile and run on Windows NT and later incarnations with the Cygwin / MinGW packages.
GuidoSerassio maintains the native Windows port of Squid (built using the Microsoft toolchain) and is actively working on having the needed changes integrated into the standard Squid distribution. His effort is partially based on earlier Windows NT port by Romeo Anghelache.
What other Squid-related documentation is available?
- The Squid home page for information on the Squid software
Squid: The Definitive Guide written by Duane Wessels and published by O’Reilly and Associates January 2004.
The IRCache Mesh gives information on our operational mesh of caches.
The Squid FAQ (uh, you’re reading it).
Squid documentation in German, Turkish, Italian, Brazilian Portugese, and another in Brazilian Portugese.
Squid Programmers Guide. Yeah, its extremely incomplete. I assure you this is the most recent version.
RFC 2186 ICPv2 — Protocol
RFC 2187 ICPv2 — Application
In upcoming articles, we’ll present the usefulness of this neat piece of software to accelerate content delivery.
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