- From: Daniel Sommermann <dcsommer@fb.com>
- Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2014 09:44:50 -0800
- To: Roberto Peon <grmocg@gmail.com>, Cory Benfield <cory@lukasa.co.uk>
- CC: HTTP Working Group <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
As another data point, this requirement has exposed some bugs in client HTTP stacks. There are some broken HTTP/1.1 implementations cannot process chunked responses. For reverse proxies that speak SPDY or HTTP/2.0 to the webserver and receive 1.1 requests without Accept-Encoding: gzip, the proxy must decompress the gzipped response from the server. Since it is difficult to predict the inflated size a priori, the response must be chunked, which breaks those clients. To not chunk the response, the proxy would have to buffer the entire body which is not great from a DOS or latency perspective. In the end, I don't think the standard should change for those broken 1.1 implementations, but it is good to be aware of this incompatibility.
Received on Tuesday, 25 February 2014 17:45:17 UTC