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What is Acrylic?

Acrylic is a local DNS proxy which improves the performance of your computer by caching the responses coming from your DNS servers. The reason why I wrote it is explained in this article.

When you browse a Web page a portion of the loading time is dedicated to name resolution (usually from a few milliseconds to 1 second or even more) while the rest is dedicated to the transfer of the page contents to your browser. What Acrylic does is to reduce the time dedicated to name resolution for frequently visited addresses closest to zero possible. It may not seem such a great optimization but in a few weeks of internet browsing you will probably save an hour or so, which is definitely not such a bad thing. With Acrylic you can also gracefully overcome short downtimes of your DNS servers without disrupting your work, because in this case you will at least be able to connect to your favourite sites and to your email server. In addition Acrylic can help you to effectively block unwanted ads prior to their download through the use of a custom HOSTS files, optimizing your navigation experience even further.

Another good thing is that Acrylic is released as open source, which means that it's completely free and its source code, written in ObjectPascal with Borland Delphi, is freely available to anyone under the GNU General Public License.

For informations about installation and configuration issues you can refer to the Acrylic User Manual.

Futhermore a great system tray monitor for Acrylic is available at dev.arqendra.net for free.

What's new in version 0.9.19 released on September 7, 2011

Solved a bug which prevented Acrylic to work with DNS servers on localhost.

What's new in version 0.9.18 released on June 24, 2011

Preconfigured to point to OpenDNS servers upon installation.

Added possibility to disable real-time data compression through a configuration option.

Added possibility to ignore negative responses coming from DNS servers through configuration options.

Added possibility to define regular expressions in the Acrylic HOSTS file.

Added support for host name compression in the Acrylic HOSTS file (*).

Solved a bug related to incorrect forwarding of silent updates.

(*) The format of exceptions has changed. Please see the Acrylic HOSTS file for further details.

What's new in version 0.9.17 released on January 8, 2011

Slightly improved performance statistics.

Acrylic cache data can now be purged through a shortcut in the Start Menu (*).

(*) This feature, removed in the past, has been reintroduced into the project.

What's new in version 0.9.16 released on December 19, 2010

Finally added an about dialog with info on installed version.

Better handling of comments within lines in the Acrylic HOSTS file.

Activation of the stats log has been moved into the Acrylic configuration file.

Acrylic can now be run as a standalone console application and not only as a Windows service (*).

(*) This feature, removed in the past, has been reintroduced into the project.

What's new in version 0.9.15 released on November 24, 2010

The setup is now compatible with Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Solved a bug which affected only the dates written inside the hit log.

Comparisons within the Acrylic HOSTS file are now case insensitive.

Added the possibility to specify a UDP port other than the default (53) for any of the DNS servers (primary, secondary and tertiary).

What's new in version 0.9.13

Performance logging to file can now be activated for the Acrylic service.

What's new in version 0.9.12

What must end into the hit log can now be specified in the configuration file (filters).

Added details about DNS servers responses in the hit log (including resolved addresses).

What's new in version 0.9.11

Indication of the destiny of a request has been added to the hit log.

Solved a bug which prevented new informations to be added to the debug log.

What's new in version 0.9.10

All the DNS requests can now be logged into a hit log for later analysis.

White exceptions (a kind of parental control mode) can now be specified.

Exceptions to pattern based matching can now be specified within the Acrylic HOSTS file.

What's new in version 0.9.9

Detailed logging to file can now be activated for the Acrylic service.

Cache exceptions (host names which are never cached) can now be specified.

What's new in version 0.9.8

Solved a bug which prevented proper name resolution for items in the Acrylic HOSTS file.

What's new in version 0.9.7

Huge performance improvements in all areas.

Added real-time compression of cached data to reduce space consumption.

Improved handling of a very large cache and a very large Acrylic HOSTS file (millions of entries).

What's new in version 0.9.6

Local binding address and port can now be explicitly specified.

Added support for pattern matching in host names within the Acrylic HOSTS file.

What's new in version 0.9.5

Can resolve requests also coming from other computers (e.g. from a LAN).

What's new in version 0.9.4

Negative responses do not override positive ones any more during silent updates.

What's new in version 0.9.3

Improved caching algorithms with negative responses and silent updates.

Improved user control over caching with two new configuration params.

Improved loading of a very large Acrylic HOSTS files on application's startup.

What's new in version 0.9.2

Added performance tracing logs to the console debug version.

Added support for predefined DNS mappings through a dedicated HOSTS file.

What's new in version 0.9.1

Solved an issue which prevented forwarding to certain classes of IP addresses.

How do I contact the author?

If you have improvements to suggest, problems to report or whatever you can contact me at msmfbn [AT] gmail [DOT] com