Re: delta encoding and state management

On Jan 17, 2013 11:57 AM, "James M Snell" <jasnell@gmail.com> wrote:
>> If the compression is hop-by-hop then there's no synchronization
>> issues.  But then middleboxes may have to decompress and always
>> re-compress (even if the headers are left unmodified) in each
>> direction.
>>
>
> That's the exact problem I'm having really. Middleboxes will be required
to maintain a complete compression state (for requests and responses) as
opposed to just passing things through. Maintaining that state could become
quite expensive. If we don't maintain it, tho, the potential sync issues
become too messy.

Right, if you want to do dreadful compression then middleboxes will have to
be stateful.

>>
>> In general I'd much rather not have connection-oriented state at all,
>> not even if it were transparent to HTTP.
>>
>
> Agreed, not sure how to avoid it and still get good compression (outside
of simply optimizing the encoding of values as much as possible... i.e.
bohe)

I'd rather do the architecturally-clean thing: optimize encodings.

Nico
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