persistent connections/pipelining (was Re: Moo Meeting transcript)

Dear All,
> > Bertold offered to help code up some HTTP/1.1 connection features in
> > Squid-1.2 with me.
>
> I'd like to help out in this one, it's important for the Cache Array
> setups I'm considering. What needs to be done?

I think, persistent connections/pipelining should be done at first.

Some notes:
- I am a bit confused about persistent connections since the spec (RFC
2068, section 8.1.3) says:
        "A proxy server MUST NOT establish a persistent connection
         with an HTTP/1.0 client.
  However, 99% of the clients claims itself to be HTTP/1.0 compliant.

But in another section of the spec (19.7.1) there is a sentence: "An
HTTP/1.1 server may also establish persistent connections with HTTP/1.0
clients upon receipt of a Keep-Alive connection token."

- there is a problem with Netscape 2.x (and compatible) browsers with
keepalive settings (see Apache_1.2b7). These browsers should not be served
with persistent connections.

- I suggest using an extra configuration option: timeout value for
persistent connections.

- the easier part is implementing the client-squid, squid-squid
connections. Squid-server is a bit more difficult since the content
negotiation part of HTTP/1.1 must be implemented as well.

- there was a suggestion for turning Pragma: no-cache to IMS request in
Squid. The same question should be raised for HTTP/1.1: should clients'
Cache-control: max-age=0 to be translated to an IMS request?

There are also issues in HTTP/1.1 according to caches (see
<URL:http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Protocols/HTTP/Issues/>)

I will send more notes...

Bertold
Received on Tue Jul 29 2003 - 13:15:40 MDT