Gmail Technical Rant

[Graycode]

(Feb. 20, 2009 06:25 AM)sidki3003 Wrote:  Maybe "chunked" to save on opening new connections?

Maybe, but perhaps they didn't think it through. While the server response comes in delayed chunks, the client-side AJAX isn't waiting between each round. It pumps another request almost immediately after the previous one completes. The AJAX should just be just polling requests with setTimeout() intervals, but apparently here they've chosen to burden their server-side resources with delay intervals.

The Transfer-Encoding: header is hop-by-hop, intermediate processes like proxies may un-encode or re-encode that as they see fit. Gmail may have a proxy-like server front end doing the chunking, and that might be where their delay is implemented.

The server should be sending a normal (complete) response, and let client browsers & proxies manage the re-usable connections in the usual efficient fashion. Hopefully they'll fix it some day.

Today I'm using a server data timeout of just a few seconds (having blocked the problematic Gmail URL). So far I haven't encountered any other sites that hold connections hostage with a server-side partial-response delay.

(Feb. 20, 2009 06:56 AM)whenever Wrote:  @Graycode, how is your proxy going? When will it be public?

Thanks for asking. The proxy works extremely well, but bringing it to the public took a hit as "The Economy" happened. A lot of preperation remains that requires funding to accomplish. If you could please fix "The Economy" I'd really appreciate that!