Polipo is a lightweight forwarding and caching web proxy server. Polipo is HTTP 1.1-compliant, supports IPv4, IPv6, traffic filtering and privacy-enhancement. To minimize latency, Polipo both pipelines multiple resource requests and multiplexes multiple transactions onto the same TCP/IP connection.[1]
Polipo is free software[2] released under the MIT License.[3] It runs on GNU/Linux, OpenWrt, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD.
Polipo can be configured to use on-disk cache and serve cached content when offline, perform various forms of content filtering and serve as a proxy to access TOR.
Design
The polipo proxy taking requests from an internal network and forwarding them to the Internet.
Polipo is designed to be used as a personal web cache or a web cache shared among a few users to boost internet access.[4][5] Designed to be fast, lightweight and small, it is useful when the system resources for a larger proxy are unavailable. Because of this reason, it has been put to uses such as a tether on the OpenWrt.
Features
The fast, lightweight and small memory footprint proxy server polipo uses a variety of techniques[2]:
- Polipo will upgrade client requests to HTTP/1.1 even if they come in as old HTTP/1.0.
- Polipo will make web browsing faster or at least appear to have less latency.
- Polipo will cache the initial segment of a download and can complete it later using Range requests, in case of interrupts.
- Polipo can to some extent substitute for filtering, privacy-enhancing proxies such as Privoxy or WWWOFFLE, it provides capabilities to block or redirect requests, censor HTTP request headers and referer information.[6]
- Polipo has complete support for IPv6.
- Since Polipo can speak both IPv4 and IPv6, Polipo can be used as a bridge between the IPv4 and IPv6 Internets.
- Polipo can speak the SOCKS 4 & SOCKS 5 protocols.
- Polipo does HTTP 1.1 pipelining well, so it can enhance internet communication latency.
- Polipo serves as a web cache.
Polipo and the anonymising proxy server TOR
Polipo can speak the SOCKS 4 & SOCKS 5 protocols and therefore is recommended for use with the TOR anonymising network. Polipo is a web proxy that does HTTP 1.1 pipelining well, so it can enhance TOR's communication latency or lag.[7][8] Polipo and Tor are available bundled together.[9]
Limitations
Polipo is limited to 2G or 4G file sizes on 32 bit systems which will cause errors when serving large requests.
GUI wrappers
Some independent graphical user interface (GUI) projects are:
- Solipo[10] - a GUI wrapper application for polipo on Windows OS
- Dolipo[11] - a GUI wrapper for Mac OS X
See also
References
External links
