In computing, a cache is a hardware or software component that stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster; the data stored in a cache might be the result of an earlier computation or a copy of data stored elsewhere. A cache hit occurs when the requested data can be found in a cache, while a cache miss occurs when it cannot. Cache hits are served by reading data from the cache, which is faster than recomputing a result or reading from a slower data store; thus, the more requests that can be served from the cache, the faster the system performs.
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, where hypertext documents include hyperlinks to other resources that the user can easily access, for example by a mouse click or by tapping the screen in a web browser.
A web server is computer software and underlying hardware that accepts requests via HTTP or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, commonly a web browser or web crawler, initiates communication by making a request for a web page or other resource using HTTP, and the server responds with the content of that resource or an error message. A web server can also accept and store resources sent from the user agent if configured to do so.
Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telephone line. Dial-up connections use modems to decode audio signals into data to send to a router or computer, and to encode signals from the latter two devices to send to another modem at the ISP.
In computer networking, a proxy server is a server application that acts as an intermediary between a client requesting a resource and the server providing that resource. It improves privacy, security, and performance in the process.
Privoxy is a free non-caching web proxy with filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, manipulating cookies and modifying web page data and HTTP headers before the page is rendered by the browser. Privoxy is a "privacy enhancing proxy", filtering web pages and removing advertisements. Privoxy can be customized by users, for both stand-alone systems and multi-user networks. Privoxy can be chained to other proxies and is frequently used in combination with Squid among others and can be used to bypass Internet censorship.
Squid is a caching and forwarding HTTP web proxy. It has a wide variety of uses, including speeding up a web server by caching repeated requests, caching World Wide Web (WWW), Domain Name System (DNS), and other network lookups for a group of people sharing network resources, and aiding security by filtering traffic. Although used for mainly HTTP and File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Squid includes limited support for several other protocols including Internet Gopher, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), Transport Layer Security (TLS), and Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS). Squid does not support the SOCKS protocol, unlike Privoxy, with which Squid can be used in order to provide SOCKS support.
Satellite Internet access is Internet access provided through communication satellites; if it can sustain high speeds, it is termed satellite broadband. Modern consumer grade satellite Internet service is typically provided to individual users through geostationary satellites that can offer relatively high data speeds, with newer satellites using the Ku band to achieve downstream data speeds up to 506 Mbit/s. In addition, new satellite internet constellations are being developed in low-earth orbit to enable low-latency internet access from space.
Throughput of a network can be measured using various tools available on different platforms. This page explains the theory behind what these tools set out to measure and the issues regarding these measurements.
HTTP pipelining is a feature of HTTP/1.1, which allows multiple HTTP requests to be sent over a single TCP connection without waiting for the corresponding responses. HTTP/1.1 requires servers to respond to pipelined requests correctly, with non-pipelined but valid responses even if server does not support HTTP pipelining. Despite this requirement, many legacy HTTP/1.1 servers do not support pipelining correctly, forcing most HTTP clients to not use HTTP pipelining.
In computer networks, a tunneling protocol is a communication protocol which allows for the movement of data from one network to another. It can, for example, allow private network communications to be sent across a public network, or for one network protocol to be carried over an incompatible network, through a process called encapsulation.
In computer networks, a reverse proxy or surrogate server is a proxy server that appears to any client to be an ordinary web server, but in reality merely acts as an intermediary that forwards the client's requests to one or more ordinary web servers. Reverse proxies help increase scalability, performance, resilience, and security, but they also carry a number of risks.
Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway, formerly known as Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server, is a discontinued network router, firewall, antivirus program, VPN server and web cache from Microsoft Corporation. It ran on Windows Server and works by inspecting all network traffic that passes through it.
Opera Mini is a mobile web browser made by Opera. It was primarily designed for the Java ME platform, as a low-end sibling for Opera Mobile, but as of 2022 only the Android build was still under active development. It had previously been developed for iOS, Windows 10 Mobile, Windows Phone 8.1, BlackBerry, Symbian, and Bada.
HTTP compression is a capability that can be built into web servers and web clients to improve transfer speed and bandwidth utilization.
WAN optimization is a collection of techniques for improving data transfer across wide area networks (WANs). In 2008, the WAN optimization market was estimated to be $1 billion, and was to grow to $4.4 billion by 2014 according to Gartner, a technology research firm. In 2015 Gartner estimated the WAN optimization market to be a $1.1 billion market.
Onspeed was a web accelerator service designed to accelerate an internet connection using compression techniques.
The Remote Web Workplace is a feature of Microsoft's Windows Small Business Server, Windows Home Server 2011, and the midsize business-focused product, Windows Essential Business Server, which enables existing users to log into a front-end network-facing interface of the small business/home server.
Polipo is a discontinued lightweight caching and forwarding web proxy server. It has a wide variety of uses, from aiding security by filtering traffic; to caching web, DNS and other computer network lookups for a group of people sharing network resources; to speeding up a web server by caching repeated requests. It can be configured to use on-disk cache and serve cached content when offline and perform various forms of content filtering.
Web performance refers to the speed in which web pages are downloaded and displayed on the user's web browser. Web performance optimization (WPO), or website optimization is the field of knowledge about increasing web performance.
