Acrylic DNS Proxy Home Page
What is Acrylic?
Why did you write it?
How do I download it?
How do I contact the author?
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.
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) 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 websites and to your e-mail server. In addition Acrylic can help you to effectively block unwanted ads prior to their download through the use of 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 7, 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 and Frequently Asked Questions.
Why did you write it?
The reason why I wrote Acrylic is explained in this article.
How do I download it?
The latest Acrylic version is 0.9.13 and can be downloaded:
As a precompiled setup package for Windows (click here).
As source code contained in a single zip archive file (click here).
Futhermore a great system tray monitor for Acrylic is available at dev.arqendra.net for free. Many thanks to TrV who wrote it and shared it!
| 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 (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 (also known as parental control mode) can now be specified.
Exceptions to pattern based matching can now be specified within the 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 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 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 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 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 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 through my e-mail address mayakron [AT] tiscali [DOT] it
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