Wikipedia

Web accelerator

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 212.118.251.123 (talk) at 21:45, 22 September 2005 (added Propel Software Corporation - www.propel.com as a major Accelerator Provider). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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 freshen objects in the cache ensuring that frequently accessed content is readily available for display.
  • 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.

Web accelerators may be installed on the client (browsing) computer or on ISP hosted servers or both. Accelerating delivery through compression requires some type of host based server to collect, compress and then deliver content to a client computer.

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.

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.

Some 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.

 

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