Proxies and persistent connections

Hi all,

Me and a colleague are starting to work on upgrading a proxy server
product from HTTP/1.0 to HTTP/1.1 and in the course of a design
discussion, a question came up.

Upon the opening of a persistent connection from a user-agent to a
proxy, is it OK for the user-agent to send multiple requests *for
different hosts* down this same connection to the proxy?

My reading of the spec makes it seem that it is indeed OK, but I don't
have an HTTP/1.1 proxy handy to be able to see how browsers behave.
But it seems almost mandatory since clients are encouraged to open
no-more than two connections to a given proxy...  Does that imply that
proxies should/must be able to "multiplex" responses - ie send
multiple HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 responses from various servers in the
proper order into a single persistent connection with a client?

This of course increases proxy implementation complexity quite a bit
wrt the other possibility, which is: one (or two) persistent
connection(s) per origin server (even through proxies)...

Can anyone help clarify?


BTW, I there is a typo in draft-ietf-http-v11-spec-rev-06.txt, section
8.1.4, last paragraph. "A single-user client SHOULD NOT maintain more
than connections with any server or proxy." should, I think read "A
single-user client SHOULD NOT maintain more than 2 connections with
any server or proxy."

TIA,
===
Wham! <wham_bang@yahoo.com>



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Received on Friday, 23 April 1999 12:46:31 UTC