aiCache is an HTTP accelerator and load balancer

Load balancing (computing)

Load balancing is a computer networking methodology to distribute workload across multiple computers or a computer cluster, network links, central processing units, disk drives, or other resources, to achieve optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid...

 designed to allow dynamic web pages to scale content by intelligently caching frequently requested content. In contrast to other HTTP accelerators, such as Squid, which began life as a client-side cache, or Apache

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server, commonly referred to as Apache , is web server software notable for playing a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web. In 2009 it became the first web server software to surpass the 100 million website milestone...

, which is primarily an origin server, aiCache was designed as an HTTP accelerator.
aiCache is the first HTTP accelerator based on Epoll

Epoll

epoll is a scalable I/O event notification mechanism for Linux, first introduced in Linux 2.5.44 . It is meant to replace the older POSIX select and poll system calls, to achieve better performance in more demanding applications, where the number of watched file descriptors is large...

 technology allowing it to employ a right-threaded (only the specified number of workers process requests, no matter how many clients are connected), non-blocking, multiplexed IO design.
aiCache is deployed on public cloud computing

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....

 platforms such as Amazon Web Services and private Virtual

Virtualization

Virtualization, in computing, is the creation of a virtual version of something, such as a hardware platform, operating system, a storage device or network resources....

  environments. It is considered an edge Device

Edge device

Edge devices are routers, routing switches, integrated access devices , multiplexers, and a variety of metropolitan area network and wide area network access devices that provide entry points into enterprise or service provider core networks...

 as it proxies

Proxy server

In computer networks, a proxy server is a server that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resource available from a different server...

 traffic, augmenting or replacing Content Delivery Networks

Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network or content distribution network is a system of computers containing copies of data placed at various nodes of a network....

endpoints.

History

The project was initially called Jxel short for Java Accelerator and was originally release in 1994. The technology was java based and intended to be run in a virtual java machine sharing the same computer system as the HTTPD daemon. It was re-written in 2009 using the C computer language and occupying its own dedicated server. It also was written to run only on Linux to take advantage of changes in the Input/output model based on EPOLL.