Re: #158: Proxy-Connection and Keep-alive

On 05/12/2011, at 5:36 PM, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> 
> It should not as it is what they're doing *right now*. Look at a
> proxy request, you'll see both "Proxy-Connection: keep-alive" and
> "Connection: keep-alive".
> 
>> * Furthermore, we don't define Keep-Alive, as it's not part of HTTP/1.1 (and therefore out of scope). It was previously abandoned as too problematic. Requiring use of a deprecated mechanism doesn't make sense.
> 
> I'm not asking to emit the Keep-alive header, rather just to suggest
> clients to continue to emit "Connection: keep-alive" when they suspect
> the proxy could be 1.0, as they're doing right now.

Browsers != all clients


>> * The primary motivation for doing so is compatibility with NTLM authentication, which is also not part of HTTP, and very clearly breaks HTTP. While we can attempt to improve interoperability for this broken extension, it cannot be at the cost of making HTTP itself more complex.
> 
> In fact there are two degrees in these motivations :
>  - the first one is to maintain a reasonable performance level, but it
>    could be argued that if some browsers are slowed down after an upgrade
>    due to loss of persistent connections, it's not dramatic, except maybe
>    in the mobile world but explicit proxies are not common there ;
> 
>  - the second one is to ensure that browser vendors are not pressured by
>    their users to revert the upgrade because it totally breaks what used
>    to work for 10 years. And this one seems much more important to me,
>    because if Proxy-Connection is still in use after so long a time, it
>    precisely is because browser vendors did not find a non-breaking upgrade
>    path.
> 
> In fact I don't care a dime about NTLM, I hate this broken and insecure
> scheme. What I care about is that the spec can *really* be applied. If we
> force developers to introduce big regressions, we all know they will revert
> the spec, and what we write there is pointless.
> 
> A few years ago, I had checked a number of different proxies' behaviour,
> and unfortunately I lost the traces since. What I recall is that most of
> them mimicked squid's behaviour, which by then was 2.x (I didn't find
> this surprizing considering that squid is the de-facto standard proxy).
> Among the important points was that an 1.1 request sent without a Connection
> or Proxy-Connection header was not considered a persistent connection, which
> is normal for an 1.0 proxy and not expected for an 1.1 client. Clients are
> already aware of this because they currently send an explicit
> "Connection: keep-alive" header.
> 
>> Clients choose whether to use persistent connections or not; it's up to them.
> 
> That's precisely my point ! If they want to have persistent connections
> on an 1.x proxy (where x is unknown), they need to send an explicit
> "Connection: keep-alive" header. Without this, they can't chose, not
> because of the protocol, but because of currently deployed products'
> behaviour which apply 1.0 semantics.
> 
>> If you want to make NTLM authentication more interoperable, I'd suggest you create a new I-D describing how to do so.
> 
> Oh no, I'm really not interested in this at all, thanks ;-)
> 
> Alternatively, maybe this tip could be placed in the section on interoperabilty
> with 1.0, because after all it's needed to talk to 1.0 proxies.

That may be. My objecting is to introducing new requirements -- not advice.

Cheers,


--
Mark Nottingham
http://www.mnot.net/

Received on Monday, 5 December 2011 07:21:00 UTC