Proxy-servers, with their capability to save bandwidth, improve security, and increase web-surfing speed are becoming more popular than ever. At this time only a few proxy-server programs are available. These proxy-servers have two main drawbacks:
| They are commercial. |
| They don't support ICP, ICP is used to exchange hints about the existence of URLs in neighbor caches . |
Derived from the cached software from the ARPA-funded Harvest research project, developed at the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research and funded by the National Science Foundation, Squid offers high-performance caching of web clients, and also supports FTP, Gopher, and HTTP data objects. It stores hot objects in RAM, maintains a robust database of objects on disk, has a complex access control mechanism, and supports the SSL protocol for proxying secure connections. In addition, it can be hierarchically linked to other Squid-based proxy servers for streamlined caching of pages.