WEB ACCELERATOR

A web accelerator is a proxy server that reduces web site access times. They can be a self-contained hardware appliance or installable software.


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 preemptively resolve host names present in a document (HTML or JavaScript) in order to reduce latency.
* They may prefect 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 optimize the code from certain documents (such as HTML or JavaScript).
* 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.