Installing the Squid Software Onto Your
System
This chapter describes how to install the Squid software onto your system.
Installing the
Squid Web
Proxy Cache
Software
The Squid software is a high-performance proxy caching server for web
clients, supporting FTP, gopher, and HTTP data objects. Unlike traditional
caching software, Squid handles all requests in a single, non-blocking, I/O-
driven process.
Squid keeps meta data and especially hot objects cached in RAM, caches DNS
lookups, supports non-blocking DNS lookups, and implements negative
caching of failed requests.
Squid supports SSL, extensive access controls, and full request logging. By
using the lightweight Internet Cache Protocol, Squid caches can be arranged
in a hierarchy or mesh for additional bandwidth savings.
Squid consists of a main server program squid, a Domain Name System
lookup program dnsserver, some optional programs for rewriting requests and
performing authentication, and some management and client tools. When
squid starts up, it spawns a configurable number of dnsserver processes, each
of which can perform a single, blocking Domain Name System (DNS) lookup.
This reduces the amount of time the cache waits for DNS lookups.