Mark Nottingham tells us about Traffic Server: [via]

A long time ago, the word in high-performance proxy-caching was Inktomi's Traffic Server. It was so fast it was referred to as being "carrier grade" and this could be said without people smirking, and it was deployed by the likes of AOL, when AOL was still how most people accessed the Internet.

A few years ago, some Yahoo! engineers found that code sitting on a shelf and decided to have a play. What they found was that it was still faster than pretty much every thing else out there. So they started using it, and built a team around it.

Fast forward to today, when the source code for Traffic Server is suddenly available as an Apache Incubator Project.