support compression headers

[kevinkreiser]

http protocol should support the content/accept encoding headers so that http clients which can and want to use compression when interacting with the server may do so.

where should the encoding happen? the obvious place would be when we finish parsing the request stream. the problem there is that that's on the main serving thread and would block request processing for other multiplexed requests. the best place then would be right before the request is worked on. the problem there is that the worker APIs are protocol agnostic. what this means is that the application which has the burden of knowing what protocol it's working on will.have to initiate the encoding. we have another problem though then which is that the pipeline can have multiple stages so the encoding needs to only happen at the last stage. again the application controls that so it will also know when it's even appropriate to check the encoding.

seems to me we should add some functions to the http request/response protocols to automatically handle this and modify the body contents and length amd encoding headers. a little bit of thought is needed to determine the most ergonomic way to do that though it seems doable

[paro-]

+1.
We would also heavily benefit from this.

[paro-]

Hi,
Any news on this? Is it planned to add a compression option for lighter communications?
Thanks, best regards.

[kevinkreiser]

sadly no i havent had the time. the work isnt all that complicated just needs a bit of thought on how the api should change to allow it. if you are using this software to front valhalla then id suggest simply adding another proxy in front of prime_server but if you are using prime_server for another use-case then we'll just have to wait for proper support to be added. just very hard to find the time these days :(

[paro-]

Hello Kevin,
We use an out-of-the-box Valhalla which in turn uses prime_server.
The responses can be very large, incurring Networking costs and time.
Providing a compression option would be lovely to optimize those.
I understand, please let us know if you plan to add the feature :)
Best,

[nilsnolde]

Don't you have a reverse proxy in front of prime_server, nginx or apache or so? It's not the exact same as having it in prime_server directly, but close enough IMO.

[paro-]

@nilsnolde No, we could code it ourselves but it would be much safer & maintainable if it was in the Valhalla package (ticket linked on top) and not needed if you're planning to add it in the foreseeable future.
Full support to you guys, good day.