Juliusz Chroboczek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> AB> To explain why there are no Content-Length headers with the latest
> AB> version of WWWOFFLE I have added the following entry to the FAQ:
>
> Am I to understand that you now do on-the-fly modification? (If so,
> I'm impressed.)
Yes, that is correct, there is on-the-fly modification of pages (when
needed).
> I would still like to encourage you to generate Content-Length
> whenever possible. C-L constitutes very useful information which may
> allow the client to perform a number of optimisations.
I think that the important word there is "may". For some clients it
may make a difference, for others it may not. Even for the ones where
it does make a difference, it will only be small. It is faster for
WWWOFFLE never to include a Content-Length header than it is to do it
in the few cases that it could.
> (In the particular case of Polipo, for example, Content-Length will
> make the proxy avoid the overhead of chunking to the client. It will
> avoid the overhead of realloc-ing an instance's in-memory index.
> Furthermore, it will be used to decide whether to pipeline or to open
> a new connection.)
A web proxy must be able to handle servers that don't provide
Content-Length on one side and a client that cannot handle chunked
encoding on the other side. As I have learned many times over with
WWWOFFLE, even if you can chose your web proxy you cannot chose how
clients and servers will behave.
It will depend very much on the implementation of the proxy or client
how much more difficult it is to handle replies that don't have a
Content-Length. This is not something that I can judge since it makes
no difference to WWWOFFLE due to its implementation.
The simple absence of a Content-Length is not in itself enough to stop
the use of pipelining. If the server is using chunked encoding then
there is no reason that pipelining cannot still be used.
--
Andrew.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew M. Bishop [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.gedanken.demon.co.uk/
WWWOFFLE users page:
http://www.gedanken.demon.co.uk/wwwoffle/version-2.8/user.html
