Re: 1.1b3 and things???

On Sun, 9 Jun 1996, Robert S. Thau wrote:

> Hmmm... I'm not sure this is really a problem. "Connection: Keep-alive"

Probably true. But I don't think we should send it. (saves us 23 bytes per request at any rate).

> HTTP/1.1 clients *do* have to be special-cased, since the absence of

Nope. Think about it; at least, think about it the way I'm thinking about it (which may not be correct):

I'm a HTTP/1.1 client. I don't understand any of that HTTP/1.0 Keep-Alive stuff, I just know the HTTP/1.1 version. I send a request, tagged with HTTP/1.1, to a server. This server is an Apache that understands HTTP/1.1 persistent connections, but calls itself a HTTP/1.0 server.

Now, what do I get back?

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Sun, 09 Jun 1996 17:33:23 GMT
Server: Apache/1.2dev Arachne-threads/0.00-DESTRUCT-0 Content-type: text/html
Content-length: 3597
Last-modified: Thu, 14 Mar 1996 21:02:27 GMT

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There's nothing in there that suggests a persistent connection. There's the Content-length, but that's not an indication - a lot of non-persistent servers send those, and there are HTTP/1.0 servers out there that send incorrect content-lengths. We're not allowed to trust them.

The server *has* to assume that we don't support persistent connections, because there's no way it could know that we do. So it waits for the connection to close, which it never does. Oops.

The only way it could have known is if we tagged ourself as HTTP/1.1, which, just like on the client side, says "this connection should be persistent unless otherwise stated".

I don't see any way around this...

-- 
________________________________________________________________________
Alexei Kosut       The Apache HTTP Server
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