Conceptually, delay pools are bandwidth limiters – “pools” of bandwidth that drain out as people browse the Web, and fill up at the rate specified – this can be thought of as a leaky bucket that is continually being filled. This is useful when bandwidth charges are in place, if we want to reduce bandwidth usage for web traffic.
Delay Pools can do wonders when combined with ACLs. These tags permit us to limit the bandwidth of certain requests, based on any criteria. Delay behavior is selected by ACLs (low and high priority traffic, staff Vs students or student Vs authenticated student or so on). In ISPs, delay pools can be implemented in a particular network to improve the quality of service. To enable this, Squid needs to be configured with the –enable-delay-pools option.
