Rails + gzip: random content-length header

[andreas]

Hi,

I'm running Rails on LSWS with dynamic response gzip compression. I noticed that Safari would try to render even short pages before they were fully loaded, and blamed it on the missing content-length header. In order to get a content-length header I enabled response buffering. Unfortunately it doesn't work reliably; some responses have a content-length header, some just don't (for the same request). Any ideas why that might be?

Andreas

[andreas]

nothing?

$ lynx -mime-header http://www.mikrocontroller.net/topic/40008 | head -n 11
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Set-Cookie: return_to=%2Ftopic%2F40008; path=/
Set-Cookie: _session_id=bfc34e7857d23aadab1f5492d2772c13; path=/; expires=Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:44:19 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache
Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:11:19 GMT
Server: LiteSpeed
Connection: close

$ lynx -mime-header http://www.mikrocontroller.net/topic/40008 | head -n 11
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Set-Cookie: return_to=%2Ftopic%2F40008; path=/
Set-Cookie: _session_id=18640c2e04e6d0173f024c0ebb0cb189; path=/; expires=Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:44:19 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache
Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 5289
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:11:20 GMT
Server: LiteSpeed
Connection: close

[mistwang]

It depends on the timing that LSWS receives the full response from backend application.
When Content-Length is not set, "Chunked" "Transfer-Encoding" should use for HTTP 1.1 client. lynx is a HTTP 1.0 client, so none of above header is set.
The problem with Safari might not be the header problem, maybe need to sniff the network traffic with tcpdump or something to figure it out.

[andreas]

Thanks, I understand now. I see the chunked header when I use

curl --compressed -D header http://www.mikrocontroller.net/topic/40003

.

Is there a way to enable response buffering for rails contexts (I guess this would disable chunked encoding)? Rails sends the response in one part anyway.

[mistwang]

You can trun on response buffering under "Ruby Rails" tab, It won't work reliably for large pages though.

[mistwang]

A HTTP/1.1 browser should support chunk encoding without any problem.