Traffic Squeezer - Optimization/Acceleration via Transparent Squid Web-Caching
Squid Cache, is a popular Open-Source solution, as many knows it already. Squid is a caching proxy for the Web supporting HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and more. It reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages. Squid has extensive access controls and makes a great server accelerator.
Squid is already used in many popular use-cases to optimize by caching traffic, as well to protect and manage organization internet services too. There are days before protocol specific NAT (stands for Network Address Translation) become popular, people used to share internet services via proxy servers in their organizations and even cyber-cafes. With a proxy server, one can share internet services provided to one machine to multiple machines or work-stations.
But in the Traffic Squeezer context this is one of the effective solution to reduce the band-width footprint overall. Every time there is a WEB_HIT (term which SQUID refers, when it finds a match/hit of the content already in its cache), the download of the entire file/content/resource download is avoided. So more probabilities of WEB_HITs, more should be the optimization. This can improve the overall performance(optimization) to a rate of 90-300% naturally.
Use-case:
Assume in a Cruise ship, where some 50 users (or in a Yacht with relatively less users) are getting dedicated internet connectivity via Satellite (or multiple redundant/shared connectivity via various Satellite links) to their laptops or getting internet connectivity in a shared on-board cyber-cafe. Out of which suppose everyone uses popular services like Facebook, Google, etc, if their logos, and other static content does not change for couple of weeks, then once these static contents are get cached into the SQUID Web-Cache, then over the time one can imagine how much MBs and eventually Gbs of data we can save, and the traffic we can optimize in a unique use-case like this.
Transparent Squid Caching:
Usually if there is a proxy/web-cache server configured, unfortunately we need to configure every browser in every browser of every work-station !
One can see below for example Mozilla Firefox Connection Settings dialog box:
This is the potential drawback if we need to use web-cache/proxy service without a Transparent Mode. It is impossible almost in many cases, and scenarios where people get/subscribe quick and temporary internet services, as in the example of the Internet access in a Cruise Ship or Yacht.
Hence it is needed to make this proxy/web-caching service transparent. If we configure a Squid based Transparent web-cache in a gateway, there is no need to change anymore any settings in each user work-stations. Squid is highly evolved by now as many knows and been in the industry for more than 10 years. Hence it has so many tricky optimization settings suited for virtually every use-case where it makes sense to use Squid solution. This makes Squid tough to get all of them configured and fine-tuned in the first place. This might also require a possible average or good know-how of its related terminology and technology. Hence Traffic Squeezer provides a abstraction and a layer upon Squid to get users a quick and easy way to get Squid specifically optimized and configured for WAN/Network Optimization context. One of the most vital requirements is Transparent Squid Web-Cache, as well as its performance monitoring and statistics.
Kindly note, Traffic Squeezer might not encapsulate/package Squid source-code. Instead, while building a WAN Optimization device with Traffic Squeezer, one can download and install Squid Source-code. After that simply use Traffic Squeezer Squid web-cache specific optimization parameters and configuration(and initialization) scripts. However, in case if there are ISO based Traffic Squeezer, possibly the compatible Squid Source-code as well pre-compiled Squid code-base.
With each release of Traffic Squeezer, the Traffic Squeezer README might include its compatible and tested version of Squid with which it can be used.
This way users can get every possible discrete Open-Source solution, which is a potential candidate and capable of WAN Optimization (with or without major customization) under one common roof which is Traffic Squeezer. And so avoiding re-inventing the wheel scenario, instead focus and achieve all integrated Open-Source WAN Optimization solution with Traffic Squeezer.
