Polipo 0.9.11 review

Polipo project is a small and fast caching web proxy (a web cache, an HTTP proxy) designed to be used by one person or a small group

License: MIT/X Consortium License File size: 145K Developer: Juliusz Chroboczek

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Polipo project is a small and fast caching web proxy (a web cache, an HTTP proxy) designed to be used by one person or a small group of people.

I like to think that is similar in spirit to WWWOFFLE, but the implementation techniques are more like the ones ones used by Squid.

Installation:

make all
su -c 'make install'
man polipo
polipo &

If you want Polipo to put itself into the background, you may replace the last line with:

polipo daemonise=true logFile="/var/log/polipo.log"

On SVR4 systems (Solaris, HP/UX), you will need to use one of the following (whichever works):

make PLATFORM_DEFINES=-DSVR4 all
make PLATFORM_DEFINES=-DSVR4 LDLIBS='-lsocket -lnsl -lresolv' all

You can also use Polipo without installing:

make
nroff -man polipo.man | more
./polipo &

Here are some key features of "Polipo":
Polipo will use HTTP/1.1 pipelining if it believes that the remote server supports it, whether the incoming requests are pipelined or come in simultaneously on multiple connections (this is more than the simple usage of persistent connections, which is done by e.g. Squid);
Polipo will cache the initial segment of an instance if the download has been interrupted, and, if necessary, complete it later using Range requests;
Polipo will upgrade client requests to HTTP/1.1 even if they come in as HTTP/1.0, and up- or downgrade server replies to the client's capabilities (this may involve conversion to or from the HTTP/1.1 chunked encoding);
Polipo has complete support for IPv6 (except for scoped (link-local) addresses).
Polipo can optionally use a technique known as Poor Man's Multiplexing to reduce latency even further.

What's New in This Release:
This release fixes a rare crash that could happen if a network interface went down while a DNS query was in progress.