It has a wide variety of uses, from aiding security by filtering traffic; to caching web, DNS and other computer network lookups for a group of people sharing network resources; to speeding up a web server by caching repeated requests.

[6] Polipo ceased to be maintained on 6 November 2016[7] due to the increasingly widespread use of encryption (i.e. HTTPS) making caching proxies obsolete.

[9][10] Designed to be fast, lightweight and small, it is useful when the system resources for a larger proxy are unavailable.

Natively, polipo comes as a highly specialized command-line interface (CLI) software application, which requires commands to be typed on the keyboard and parameters stored in configuration text files.

Some independent GUI wrapper projects are: The fast, lightweight and small memory footprint proxy server polipo uses a variety of techniques:[5] Polipo is limited to 2G or 4G file sizes on 32 bit systems which will cause errors when serving large requests.