Pound (software)
| Pound | |
|---|---|
| Basic data
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| developer | Apsis GmbH |
| Current version | 2.7 (January 26, 2015) |
| operating system | Linux, Solaris, OpenBSD |
| programming language | C. |
| category | Reverse proxy |
| License | GPL ( Free Software ) |
| German speaking | No |
| www.apsis.ch/pound | |
Pound is a reverse proxy , a load balancer and HTTPS - wrapper . It can forward requests from web clients (primarily from browsers) to one or more web servers based on rules . In particular, Pound can recognize sessions , for example through cookies or login character strings. Once a session has been recognized, it is always sent to the same web server.
Pound can be used as a load balancer to distribute incoming requests to multiple web servers and thus minimize the overall load. It is also an SSL wrapper, so it can decrypt incoming encrypted communication and then forward it unencrypted to the web server working in the background.
Since Pound passes through most of all requests completely unchanged, it should be compatible with any type of web server (such as Apache , IIS , Zope , Apache Tomcat , etc.) and not cause any problems.
Pound is not a web server, so it does not process any requests itself, but only forwards them to the servers (backends) working behind it. It is also not a web cache , i.e. it does not buffer any data in order to be able to answer frequently occurring inquiries more quickly.