Squid is used to set up a fast web caching server with support for fast rendering and serving web-sites from intermediate servers. This not only speeds up browsing and file access on the client end, it also enhances the server end allowing load to be distributed across many caching servers lessening load on the actual server.

Squid

With Squid, we can heavily minimize bandwidth usage across networks.  Not only this, Squid allows us to route content requests to servers, and build cache server hierarchies. This allows further balancing of the cache within a network itself by creating content clusters. The cache system is currently available only for Apache servers.

Another good thing about Squid is that it caches only the content that is in frequent demand. This saves the creation of unnecessary caches. This caching works for HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and many other browser protocols.

The software is available for Windows as well as Linux, and is licensed under the GPL. The software will be of special use in places with slow Internet access or places with slow web servers. Another interesting factor is it’s support for FTP caching.

Currently, Squid is being integrated into firewalls and is used extensively by Content Delivery Networks.

To know more about Squid, visit the Squid Homepage ^[1].