Re: Header field name representation, was: Rechartering HTTPbis

On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 12:04:19PM -0700, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> On 1/26/12 3:37 AM, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 11:13:28AM +0100, Julian Reschke wrote:
> >> On 2012-01-26 10:35, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> >>> ...
> >>> I find it pretty cumbersome to force everyone to support zlib, especially
> >>> in environments where it provides no benefit (small requests/responses)
> >>> and only adds CPU usage and latency. It's especially true on intermediary
> >>> components which would have to decompress everything to be able to perform
> >>> trivial actions such as decide what server to forward to. Using either pure
> >>> binary header names or short forms would already be quite efficient.
> >>> ...
> >>
> >> What's a binary header name?
> > 
> > Oh I'm realizing I wrote that ! I was meaning the use of enums instead of
> > headers for the common ones. For instance, we could have bytes 0x80 to 0xFF
> > directly mapped to most common headers and be able to represent 128 different
> > headers with a single byte, and have the other chars for the other ones.
> 
> Sounds a bit like CoAP:
> 
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-core-coap/

Indeed, we could see similarities. However CoAP appears to be mainly aimed
at embedded system where a byte is counted as 8 bits, and where it makes
sense to trade scalability for compactness.

Regards,
Willy

Received on Friday, 27 January 2012 20:07:42 UTC