Squid box, speed up your browsing

So what is the purpose of one of these boxes?
 
Speed up browsing of pages that you visit often. Big speed increases. I once put my temp internet files folder in a ram drive. It made a significant impact. Everytime a feller shut the machine off one would loose the built up cache info however.
 
Does it go out automatically and update the pages? Or does it just grab the updated info when you visit it again?
 
It's pretty much just your own personal proxy server I do believe
 
Squid is the most popular web caching software in use today. It works on a variety of platforms, including Linux, FreeBSD, and Microsoft Windows. Squid improves network performance by reducing the amount of bandwidth used when surfing the Web. It makes web pages load faster and can even reduce the load on your web server. By caching and reusing popular web content, Squid allows you to get by with smaller network connections. It also protects the hosts on your internal network by acting as a firewall and proxying your internal web traffic. You can use Squid to collect statistics about the traffic on your network, prevent users from visiting inappropriate web sites at work or school, ensure that only authorized users can surf the Internet, and enhance your privacy by filtering sensitive information from web requests. Companies, schools, libraries, and organizations that use web-caching proxies can look forward to a multitude of benefits. Written by Duane Wessels, the creator of Squid, Squid: The Definitive Guide will help you configure and tune Squid for your particular situation. Newcomers to Squid will learn how to download, compile, and install code. Seasoned users of Squid will be interested in the chapters that tackle advanced topics such as high-performance storage options, rewriting requests, HTTP server acceleration, monitoring, debugging, and troubleshooting Squid.
 
What is Squid?

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.

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, some optional programs for rewriting requests and performing authentication, 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 proje

 
Looks cool, seems like a good idea.
 
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