First some background. We use Apache HTTPD 2.0 over a high-latency, high packet loss GPRS WAN. The cost per byte is tangible. We use SSL. We also use Transfer-Encoding: chunked sometimes. This is a machine monitoring application. We are using iframe streaming to push real time data to operators browsers.
I have noticed after much faffing around with wireshark that httpd will transmit 3 Application Data fragments for each chunk in a chunked HTTP stream. The fragments are the HTTP chunk size, the chunk data, and then a CRLF. All fragments in an SSL session are rounded to the length of the ciphers block size. This results in the 4+2 bytes for the chunk frame ending up being 64 bytes of data over TCP. A waste of 58 bytes per chunk in this case. I'm not aware of any reason for this to behave specifically in this way and clearly combining the entire chunk into a single SSL fragment would provide a significant bandwidth saving for HTTP streaming applications if not more mainstream ones. I've done a fair amount of poking through the httpd source today to try and isolate this but this is my first foray into the depths of httpd so I've not got far in the direction of a solution. I have identified that this 'problem' is due to the way the chunk_filter function adds buckets into the brigade which end up getting turned into their own fragments by mod_ssl. Creating a new bucket which has the extra data wrapped around it would presumably be far too inefficient for a general solution. I was considering using the FLUSH bucket type but am not fully aware of how it's used by the various filters. I'm not sure what the ideal way is to go about fixing this, or if it's even in fact an actual source code level problem rather than a configuration one, hence why this is posted to users for now. I can provide text dumps from tshark if that would be more illuminating of the patterns I'm seeing. Alex Stapleton --------------------------------------------------------------------- The official User-To-User support forum of the Apache HTTP Server Project. See <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/userslist.html> for more info. To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@httpd.apache.org " from the digest: users-digest-unsubscr...@httpd.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@httpd.apache.org
