Bug#237948: ITP: polipo -- caching web proxy
Tom Huckstep wrote:
On Sun, Mar 14, 2004 at 05:13:56PM +0100, Andreas Barth wrote:
What are the advantages compared with the packages we currently have
in Debian, e.g. wwwoffle?
See
http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/polipo/manual/Other-HTTP-Proxies.html
for the reasons the upstream author believes Polipo is better than other
HTTP proxies.
Tom
Indeed...... hmm...
Not Found
The requested URL /~jch/software/polipo/manual/Other-HTTP-Proxies.html
was not found on this server.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Apache/1.3.22 Server at www.pps.jussieu.fr Port 80
You might have meant,
http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/polipo/manual/Other-HTTP-proxies.html#Other%20HTTP%20proxies
http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/polipo/manual/WWWOFFLE.html#WWWOFFLE
Anyway, the page says,
WWWOFFLE WWWOFFLE <http://www.gedanken.demon.co.uk/wwwoffle/>, an
elegant personal proxy, is the primary model for Polipo.
WWWOFFLE has more features than can be described here. It will
censor banner ads, clean your HTML, decorate it with random colours,
schedule fetches for off-peak hours.
Unfortunately, the HTTP traffic that WWWOFFLE generates is
disgusting. It will open a connection for every fetch, and forces the
client to do the same.
WWWOFFLE only caches complete instances.
I used WWWOFFLE for many years, and frustration with WWWOFFLE's
limitations was the main reason why I started Polipo in the first place.
So essentially, it is like wwwoffle. I do not think that there is too
much overhead in wwwoffle especially since most people using it might
want to get a rather small number of pages (slow connection and/or low
amount of discspace as described in this bug report. - small memory
footprint). Anyway, over a slow connection, wwwoffle does not have a lot
of overhead. Even if a new connection has to be established for every
single item, the overhead would primarly be with the server AFAIK. But
then over dialup, you cannot DL that many things at the same time.
I know that a long time ago when I had regular modem line, I used
wwwoffle quite a lot. I found it to be very fast. Polipo might have some
advantages over wwwoffle though, but I'm not sure they would make me
switch from using wwwoffle....
As for some comparisons with other proxies like Squid (I use that now -
very good.. Caches debian packages nicely and now I have a 16G archive
of slashdot, http.us.debian.org, kernel.org and lots of google! :), the
author wrote,
Squid's developers have decided to re-write it in C++.
Now that's a *really* bad comparison! It is like saying, "Windows sucks
because I talked with that support guy and he said no one is rewriting
it using Perl!" :) Rewriting something for the sake of rewriting is just
<fill in the blank>.
Anyway, the author also writes as to why to use polipo,
Opening multiple TCP connections has significant performance
implications. Most obviously, connection setup and teardown require
additional packet exchanges which increase network usage and, more
importantly, latency.
Since things like wwwoffle are used for offline caching (last I
checked), latency is not a big problem there. So, at least I do not
understand the advantage of polipo. The overhead would not add more than
a handful of *seconds*, at least in my experience on a 14.4k modem :)
Many computers (2 or more) using one or more connection(s)
- use squid
Small number of boxes on dialup and doing some work offline to save
money (pay per min)
- wwwoffle
One computer dialing the internet and we want a low latency & cache
- use browser's cache
I'm using squid at home with only a handful of computers (total). Squid
runs on a general server (old PPro) and only uses about 20M of RAM. I
can really find not too many reasons for people running an online proxy
on high speed lines that would be something different than squid....
Where does polipo fit?
- Adam
--
Building your applications one byte at a time
http://www.galacticasoftware.com
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