Re: [hybi] hum #3: Message

[Willy Tarreau <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Aug 05, 2010 at 12:04:51PM -0700, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> In HTTP, it's common to send large entities with a length, even though a chunked encoding is available.
> In my experience, an explicit length is used much more often than chunked encoding, 

It is only available in HTTP/1.1, not in 1.0, which is one reason many
software have to implement both methods, and when they want only one
method, they implement the common one (length). But when the length
cannot be determined in advance, they simply don't advertise the length
an use the close mode (check how some compression plugins work, you'll
notice this).

> and I don't believe I've ever seen an HTTP message greater than 2^32 bytes in length sent with chunked transfer-encoding.

Streamed audio or video is sometimes sent with chunked encoding
and can be of infinite length.

In fact, the analogy with HTTP is a proof that we'd better implement
chunked encoding from the beginning, otherwise even if we add it later,
it may get limited use due to compatibility concerns.

Willy