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Web accelerator

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A web accelerator is a proxy server that reduces web site access times. Web accelerators may use several techniques to achieve this reduction:

  • They may cache recently or frequently accessed documents so they may be sent to the client with less latency or at a faster transfer rate than the remote server could.
  • They may prefetch documents that are likely to be accessed in the near future.
  • They may compress documents to a smaller size, for example by reducing the quality of images or by sending only what's changed since the document was last requested.
  • They may filter out ads and other undesirable objects so they are not sent to the client at all.
  • They may maintain persistent TCP connections between the client and the proxy server.

As of June 2005, these applications generally serve to improve dial-up and other low speed connections. Many users can achieve a 2 to 3 times speed increase in average browsing experience, while some report a 5 to 10 times speed increases for specific web pages.

The first web accelerator was developed by Peak Technologies and made commercially available in November of 1996. The product, NetJet (renamed PeakJet) acted as a smart, caching proxy that provided link prefetching capabilities. NetJet was written in the Java language and could arguably be called the first commercial, shrink-wrapped application software. NetJet's core technology was extracted from the ExpressO Server core. ExpressO was developed by Innovative Desktop's founder Charles Thomas Russell in 1996.

Google's Web Accelerator has attempted to improve broadband access to the sites. Moreover, they are designed for web browsing and, sometimes, for e-mailing and can not improve speeds of streaming, gaming, P2P downloads or many other internet applications. Many ISPs offer web accelerators as a part of their dial up service.

Web accelerators have been very controversial pieces of software. Critics claim that prefetching HTML page links slows the internet backbone. Others suggest that the accelerators overload web servers with prefetching and cache freshening behaviors. Many sites have banned the use of web accelerators due to these perceptions.


 

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