Abstract: A system designed for increasing network communication speed for users, while lowering network congestion for content owners and ISPs. The system employs network elements including an acceleration server, clients, agents, and peers, where communication requests generated by applications are intercepted by the client on the same machine. The IP address of the server in the communication request is transmitted to the acceleration server, which provides a list of agents to use for this IP address. The communication request is sent to the agents. One or more of the agents respond with a list of peers that have previously seen some or all of the content which is the response to this request (after checking whether this data is still valid).

Abstract: A system for resolving domain name system (DNS) queries, contains a communication device for resolving DNS queries, wherein the communication device further contains a memory and a processor that is configured by the memory, a cache storage for use by the communication device, and a network of authoritative domain name servers, where in a process of the communication device looking up a DNS request within the cache storage, if the communication device views an expired DNS entry within the cache storage, the communication device continues the process of looking up the DNS request in the cache storage while, in parallel, sending out a concurrent DNS request to an authoritative domain name server that the expired DNS entry belongs to.

Abstract: A system designed for increasing network communication speed for users, while lowering network congestion for content owners and ISPs. The system employs network elements including an acceleration server, clients, agents, and peers, where communication requests generated by applications are intercepted by the client on the same machine. The IP address of the server in the communication request is transmitted to the acceleration server, which provides a list of agents to use for this IP address. The communication request is sent to the agents. One or more of the agents respond with a list of peers that have previously seen some or all of the content which is the response to this request (after checking whether this data is still valid).

Abstract: A method for increasing storage space in a system containing a block data storage device, a memory, and a processor is provided. Generally, the processor is configured by the memory to tag metadata of a data block of the block storage device indicating the block as free, used, or semifree. The free tag indicates the data block is available to the system for storing data when needed, the used tag indicates the data block contains application data, and the semifree tag indicates the data block contains cache data and is available to the system for storing application data type if no blocks marked with the free tag are available to the system.

Abstract: A system for resolving domain name system (DNS) queries, contains a communication device for resolving DNS queries, wherein the communication device further contains a memory and a processor that is configured by the memory, a cache storage for use by the communication device, and a network of authoritative domain name servers, where in a process of the communication device looking up a DNS request within the cache storage, if the communication device views an expired DNS entry within the cache storage, the communication device continues the process of looking up the DNS request in the cache storage while, in parallel, sending out a concurrent DNS request to an authoritative domain name server that the expired DNS entry belongs to.