Web accelerator: Difference between revisions

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{{Short description|Proxy server reducing website access time}}

{{More footnotes needed|date=November 2023}}

A '''web accelerator''' is a [[proxy server]] that reduces [[website]] access time. They can be a self-contained hardware appliance or installable software.

Web accelerators may be installed on the client computer or mobile device, on [[Internet service provider|ISP]] servers, on the server computer/network, or a combination. Accelerating delivery through compression requires some type of host-based server to collect, compress and then deliver content to a client computer.

==<span lang="en-us" dir="ltr">Techniques</span>==

Web accelerators may use several techniques to achieve this reduction in access time:

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==Web client accelerator==

Introduced in 2001-2002 [[https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB106012229328087800]], these applications generally serve to improve [[dial-up]], [[broadband]] and other connections from which users may not be getting the best speed. Many Dialup ISPs offer web accelerators as a part of their services. The pre-compression operates much more efficiently than the on-the-fly compression of V.44 modems. Typically, website text is compacted to 5%, thus increasing effective dialup throughput to approximately 1000 &nbsp;kbit/s, and JPEG/GIF/PNG images are lossy-compressed to 15–20%, increasing effective throughput to 300 &nbsp;kbit/s.

The drawback of this approach is a loss in quality, where the graphics acquire [[compression artifacts]] taking on a blurry or colorless appearance. However, the transfer speed is dramatically improved. If desired, the user may choose to view uncompressed images instead, but at a much slower load rate.

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* [[WinGate]]

* [[Ziproxy]]

* [[Varnish (software)|Varnish]]

==Web server accelerator==

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* [[aiScaler]]

* Apache [[Traffic Server]]

* [[Apache HTTP Server]]

* [[ApplianSys#CACHEbox|CACHEbox]]

* [[Caddy (web server)|Caddy]]

* [[lighttpd]]

* [[nginx]]

* [[Polipo]] (not maintained)

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<references/>

==External links==

*{{dmoz|Computers/Internet/Proxying_and_Filtering/Products_and_Tools/Software/Server/|Web Accelerators}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Web Accelerator}}

[[Category:Web accelerators| ]]