Wcol: WWW Collector Home Page

wcolE - WWW collector 5th generation

*** Contents ***
Overview (this page): Features | Platforms | Source | History | Links
Technical Topics : Prefetching concept | Proxy combinations
Developer's Information : ICP_NOTIFY

The Wcol is a prefetching proxy server for WWW. The program prefetches referred pages from user retrieved page. It improves most of WWW latency.

The Wcol runs on most popular UNIX. You get a fast WWW service using Wcol.

Features and Advantages from Other Proxies

Prefetching
Wcol parses references by parsing of HTML and fetches them before request from client.
Multi-thread and multi-process
Wcol waits and handles requests with multi-processes, and one process handles many connections.
Caching
Wcol stores retrieved resources and the result of prefetching.
ICP query
Wcol sends query other proxies by Internet Cache Protocol (ICP). It is possible to built a hieracical caching.
Conversion
Convert server response to other formats.

Platforms

The Wcol runs on most popular UNIX. Its requirements are below:

WcolD and older version of Wcol runs more platforms. WcolE will run such platforms. WcolE is tested the following systems:

Please let me known that WcolE runs your system or not.

Source and Distributions

History

The Wcol have developing since 1994. The prefetching proxy server was big challenge for network service. Prefetching requires many technique and many resources. There were many trial of implementation. We got good prefetching proxy server and knowledge about prefetching through them. However, it is not best. We challenge to new features.

A: prototype of caching (1994/6,7)

B: prefetching (1994/8)

C: asyncronus connections (1995/2)

D: pre-fork and fd-passing (1995/9)

E: asyncronus and pre-fork (1997/1...) -- Current generation, wcolC+wcolD


k-chinen@is.aist-nara.ac.jp, 2002