Viewed 330,000 times daily, 120 million times/year

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Note Alexa and Compete.com and other traffic tracking sites do not account for the volume through our unique squid architecture.

Squid is a high-performance proxy server that can also be used as a HTTP accelerator for the webserver. Explained in layman terms, Squid will store a copy of the pages served by webserver and the next time the same page is requested, Squid will serve the copy. This process is called "caching" and it removes the need for the webserver to regenerate that same page again, resulting in a tremendous performance boost for the webserver. "Hitcounters" and traffic tracking sites do not take into account the "hits" on the various squids.

Since MediaWiki websites are generated entirely dynamically, there is a substantial performance gain in running Squid as a HTTP accelerator for your webserver. In fact, sites like Wikipedia use several Squid caches to enhance their performance.

Because of this performance gain, MediaWiki has been designed to integrate closely with Squid. For example, MediaWiki will notify Squid when a page should be purged from the cache in order to be regenerated.