Mailing-List: contact dev-help@httpd.apache.org; run by ezmlm
Precedence: bulk
Reply-To: dev@httpd.apache.org
Received-SPF: neutral (athena.apache.org: local policy)
Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v753.1)
In-Reply-To: <3ad3168b0908200201s39365d97h25ad1ed7d22dbf4a@mail.gmail.com>
References: <3ad3168b0908190953u599afdd8gc47d932e364256b4@mail.gmail.com>
 <A83AAAA7-AA78-48E3-9F8D-0059CAECBE56@gbiv.com>
 <3ad3168b0908200201s39365d97h25ad1ed7d22dbf4a@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed
Message-Id: <AF17C373-922A-4DC0-8FF3-C15BAE585B5C@gbiv.com>
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
From: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@gbiv.com>
Subject: Re: mod_ssl and Transfer-Encoding: chunked wastes ~58 bytes per
  chunk.
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 15:52:08 -0700
To: dev@httpd.apache.org

On Aug 20, 2009, at 2:01 AM, Alex Stapleton wrote:
> 2009/8/19 Roy T. Fielding <fielding@gbiv.com>:
>> On Aug 19, 2009, at 9:53 AM, Alex Stapleton wrote:
>>
>>> (This has been cross posted to users@. I apologise if this mail  
>>> isn't
>>> relevant to the dev list.)
>>>
>>> First some background. We use Apache HTTPD 2.0 over a high-latency,
>>> high packet loss GPRS WAN. The cost per byte is tangible. We use  
>>> SSL.
>>> We also use Transfer-Encoding: chunked sometimes. This is a machine
>>> monitoring application. We are using iframe streaming to push real
>>> time data to operators browsers.
>>>
>>> I have noticed after much faffing around with wireshark that httpd
>>> will transmit 3 Application Data fragments for each chunk in a  
>>> chunked
>>> HTTP stream. The fragments are the HTTP chunk size, the chunk data,
>>> and then a CRLF. All fragments in an SSL session are rounded to the
>>> length of the ciphers block size. This results in the 4+2 bytes for
>>> the chunk frame ending up being 64 bytes of data over TCP. A  
>>> waste of
>>> 58 bytes per chunk in this case.
>>
>> That's odd -- we don't do this with non-SSL writes (last I checked).
>> Perhaps we are relying on a TCP cork for the non-SSL case?
>> What is your operating system and platform?
>
> I initially discovered this issue on a fairly old Ubuntu 6 machine
> running httpd 2.0.55-4ubuntu4.1. I have since recreated it on my OS X
> 10.5 iMac using httpd 2.0.64 from MacPorts. I suppose I should also
> point out that I am using PHP 5.2.9 to generate the chunked data. If
> there's a way of doing chunked output using "plain" Apache let me know
> and I can test that too if needed.

Er, have you tested it with 2.2.x?  The likelihood of us making any
non-security changes to the 2.0.x branch is extremely small.

Apache does chunked output by default if no content-length is
provided and the client says it is HTTP/1.1.

....Roy