Web accelerator

A web accelerator is a proxy server that reduces web site access times. Web accelerators may use several techniques to achieve this reduction:

They may cache recently or frequently accessed documents so they may be sent to the client with less latency or at a faster transfer rate than the remote server could.
They may prefetch documents that are likely to be accessed in the near future.
They may compress documents to a smaller size, for example by reducing the quality of images or by sending only what's changed since the document was last requested.
They may filter out unnecessary documents so they are not sent to the client at all.

References

This computer network-related article is a stub. Help Wikipedia by expanding it.