Description:

Squid is a high-performance proxy caching server for web clients,
supporting FTP, gopher, and HTTP data objects. Unlike traditional
caching software, 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. If
you are tight on memory, check out the NOVM version of this package.
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, a Domain Name
System lookup program dnsserver, a program for retrieving FTP data
ftpget, and some management and client tools. When squid starts up, it
spawns a configurable number of dnsserver processes, each of which can
perform a single, blocking Domain Name System (DNS) lookup. This
reduces the amount of time the cache waits for DNS lookups. Squid is
derived from the ARPA-funded Harvest project.