Re: APT do not work with Squid as a proxy because of pipelining default

[Bjørn Mork <bjorn@mork.no>]

Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de> writes:

> A HTTP/1.1 conforming server or proxy 

This is not the real world...

> is free to process pipelined
> requests serially one by one. The only requirement is that it does not
> corrupt the second request by reading all available data into a buffer,
> parsing the first request and then throwing away the buffer and thereby
> discarding the subsequent requests in that buffer. It is perfectly fine
> for the server to parse the first request, think, respond to the first
> request and then continue to parse the second one.

Yes, this can be done.  But you should ask yourself what proxies are
used for.  The serializing strategy will work, but it will make the
connection slower with a proxy than without.  That's not going to sell
many proxy servers.

> Note that that behaviour in the server already gives a huge speed
> increase. It cuts away the round trip time between the last responce and
> the next request. For static web content the speedup of processing
> pipelined requests truely in parallel is neglible anyway. Only dynamic
> pages, where formulating the responce to a request takes time, would
> benefit by working on multiple responces on multiple cores. And those
> are probably busy handling requests from other connections. So I
> wouldn't expect servers to actually to parallel processing of pipelined
> requests at all.

This is true for a web server.  It is only true for a proxy server if it
can either forward a pipelined request or parallelize it.  That's where
we get the complexity.

If you keep your simple serial strategy, then a pipelined request will
be slower than a parallel one.

> And your argument 1 applies perfectly to fixing squid by the way. It
> should accept pipelined requests and then it can proces them one by one
> and send them non pipelined if it likes. It should NOT corrupt the
> requests/responces.

Sure.  Squid should be fixed.  But I'm afraid fixing squid in Debian
won't fix all the http proxies around the world.

> So just from your argument 1 APT should default not to pipeline and
> squid should be fixed.

Good.


Bjørn