Polipo


Polipo is a 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.
To minimize latency, Polipo both pipelines multiple resource requests and multiplexes multiple transactions onto the same TCP/IP connection. Polipo is HTTP 1.1-compliant, supports IPv4, IPv6, traffic filtering and privacy-enhancement.
Polipo is free software released under the MIT License.
Polipo ceased to be maintained on 6 November 2016 due to the increasingly widespread use of encryption making caching proxies obsolete.

Design

Polipo is designed to be used as a personal web cache or a web cache shared among a few users to boost internet access. Designed to be fast, lightweight and small, it is useful when the system resources for a larger proxy are unavailable. Because of this, it has been put to uses such as a tether on the OpenWrt.

GUI wrappers

Natively, polipo comes as a highly specialized command-line interface software application, which requires commands to be typed on the keyboard and parameters stored in configuration text files. Alternatively, polipo allows users to run the program automated and non-interactively, such as in a shell script. By starting a GUI wrapper application users can intuitively interact with polipo, start and stop it and change its working parameters, through graphical icons and visual indicators.
Some independent GUI wrapper projects are:
The fast, lightweight and small memory footprint proxy server polipo uses a variety of techniques:
Polipo is limited to 2G or 4G file sizes on 32 bit systems which will cause errors when serving large requests.