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Item12961: Firefox does not send an accept-encoding in a http-2.0 (aka spdy) connection

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Priority: Normal
Current State: Closed
Released In: 2.0.0
Target Release: major
Applies To: Engine
Component:
Branches: trunk
Reported By: MichaelDaum
Waiting For:
Last Change By: GeorgeClark
The specs of SPDY, the new and upcoming HTTP protocol, say that all content requires to be compressed. Web-Servers like Nginx (there's a mod_spdy for Apache as well afaik), will do so in case the upstream Foswiki backend doesn't provided a compressed content right away.

Foswiki is able to gzip html already, and even cache the gzipped content to prevent repetitive compressing efforts on the server.

It will then fetch the gzip blob from the cache and send it to the client using the web-server down the line. However it will currently only do so when the browser indicated that it is accepting compressed content using the accept-encoding http header.

Chrome does fine: it sends an accept-encoding in its request even though this would be redundant in a http-spdy connection that is requiring compression anyway.

Firefox causes problems: it does not send an accept-encoding in a http-spdy connection, maybe to spare the extra bits in the request, who knows. In this case Foswiki will read the cache, find a compressed html blob, decompresses it as the browser did not specify accept-encoding, sends it to the web-server, which then decides to compress it again talking http-spdy to the browser.

Foswiki is not alone wrt Firefox here. Other web platforms have got the same problem as far as I have researched.

The obvious solution would be for Foswiki to detect that this is a http-spdy connection ... which however it can't. There's no such flag in the http request header, at least no one that makes it thru down the web-server-(f)cgi lane.

Only solution I've found so far is to add a SPDY header to the ENV of the upstream Foswiki server in case the web-server is in a spdy session with the browser.

Using Nginx this is done easiest by editing /etc/fastcgi_params and add the line

fastcgi_param  SPDY $spdy;

This will set $ENV{SPDY} to a boolean value depending on the connection type. In turn Foswiki can then decide not to decompress a cached html page even though accept-encoding hasn't been specified.

-- MichaelDaum - 10 Jul 2014

 

ItemTemplate edit

Summary Firefox does not send an accept-encoding in a http-2.0 (aka spdy) connection
ReportedBy MichaelDaum
Codebase
SVN Range
AppliesTo Engine
Component
Priority Normal
CurrentState Closed
WaitingFor
Checkins distro:920ae6f5314c
TargetRelease major
ReleasedIn 2.0.0
CheckinsOnBranches trunk
trunkCheckins distro:920ae6f5314c
Release01x01Checkins
Topic revision: r3 - 05 Jul 2015, GeorgeClark
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