Polipo is a lightweight caching HTTP proxy designed to reduce network latency and bandwidth consumption while making modest demands on system resources. It acts as an intermediary between web browsers and remote servers, forwarding requests and storing responses that can be reused.
The software was designed around non-blocking network operations, allowing it to manage multiple connections without requiring a separate thread for every client. Its approach to HTTP pipelining and caching was intended to improve performance on connections with significant latency.
Polipo supports HTTP/1.1 and can communicate with older HTTP/1.0 clients and servers. It also provides facilities for filtering requests and forwarding traffic through other proxies, including SOCKS servers.
The original project is no longer maintained. Its developer has explicitly discontinued development, making it unsuitable for new deployments where ongoing security maintenance is important.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- HTTP response caching – stores frequently accessed resources to reduce repeated network requests.
- Single-threaded, non-blocking architecture with modest resource requirements.
- HTTP/1.1 pipelining – sends multiple requests over persistent connections to compatible servers.
- Partial-download caching – retains incomplete responses and can retrieve missing content using HTTP Range requests.
- HTTP protocol handling – manages communication between HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 clients and servers.
- IPv4 and IPv6 networking, including communication between clients and servers using different IP versions.
- Configurable content filtering to restrict access to specified URLs.
- HTTP parent proxy support for forwarding requests through another proxy server.
- SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 upstream proxy support.
- HTTPS tunnelling for encrypted connections.
- Transparent proxy operation when appropriately configured.
- Configurable memory and disk caching for retaining web objects.
- Local administration facilities for inspecting and managing cached content.
Website: www.irif.fr/~jch//software/polipo
Support:
Developer: Juliusz Chroboczek, Christopher Davis
License: MIT License
Polipo is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Web Delivery Tools | |
|---|---|
| Vinyl HTTP Cache | Web accelerator written with performance and flexibility in mind |
| Traffic Server | HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2.0 compliant caching proxy server |
| Squid | High-performance proxy caching server and web cache daemon |
| Tinyproxy | Lightweight web proxy daemon |
| Privoxy | Non-caching Web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities |
| Polipo | Caching HTTP proxy which has modest resource needs |
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