Forum OpenACS Q&A: AOLServer support HTTP 1.1 Pipelining

1: AOLServer support HTTP 1.1 Pipelining

Posted by Joel Natividad on 05/15/02 04:19 PM

Folks,
A bit offtopic, but been using the latest Mozilla lately (and loving it) and I just wanted to know if AOLServer supports HTTP 1.1, specifically pipelining. (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/Performance/Pipeline.html)

Thanks in advance!

2: Response to AOLServer support HTTP 1.1 Pipelining (response to 1)

Posted by Joel Natividad on 05/15/02 04:39 PM

Ooopppss...
Forgot to give more background info. Basically, Mozilla supports Pipelining and it seems to give a noticeable performance boost (theoretical max is supposedly up to 10x faster).

It seems IIS doesn't (http://www.pipeboost.com/default.asp), and Apache does (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/FAQ.html#what).

Can't seem to find any info on the Aolserver.com page (no more search!) that's why I'm asking here.

3: Response to AOLServer support HTTP 1.1 Pipelining (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 05/16/02 03:10 AM

It does support the older "keep-alive" protocol. I just checked the doc you referenced which defines 1.1's pipelining as based on the "keep-alive" extension to 1.0. I'd be very surprised if AOLserver didn't because 1.1's been around for some time and sites like AOL.com and MapQuest.com are among the busiest in the world ...

4: Response to AOLServer support HTTP 1.1 Pipelining (response to 1)

Posted by Joel Natividad on 05/16/02 06:37 PM

Thanks Don,
While we're on the subject of HTTP acceleration as a "cheap" way to improve the user experience, has anybody else deployed Jerry Asher's rlreturnz gzip encoding for AOLserver? (much like mod_gzip for Apache)

Also, if its stable enough, are there any plans of putting it in the OpenACS AOLServer distribution?

Some links you may want to check:

Right now, we're running a text-heavy press site - a great candidate for html gzip pre-encoding, and I'd like to increase the responsiveness of the site, especially since the traffic spikes up dramatically when breaking news is announced on the site.

Thanks,

5: Response to AOLServer support HTTP 1.1 Pipelining (response to 1)

Posted by Jerry Asher on 05/16/02 06:46 PM

Just to clarify, that's not my rlreturnz, the rl stands for RubyLane, and the module was originally written for AOLserver 2.3.3 by Jim Wilcoxson. If I recall, all I did was modify it to compile with AOLserver 3. I believe those were trivial mods, more to the make file than to the code itself.

I would imagine Jim has been running it, and I know lots of folks have downloaded it. Are they running it? Dunno. There was also some other work done by someone (Michael Cleverly?) to more fully integrate it into the adp mechanism. So it has gotten some good amount of poking.

I have it installed, but since I haven't picked up the adp work yet, and I do most of my work with adps, I haven't used rlreturnz much.

6: Response to AOLServer support HTTP 1.1 Pipelining (response to 1)

Posted by David Walker on 05/16/02 06:46 PM

Consider putting a squid cache in front of it. My tests showed that my boxes were capable of returning about 15 pages per second directly or over 500 pages per second with the squid cache.

You'll need to hack your pages to return a last-modified header for pages that you want squid to cache. For a news page this could be the posting time of the latest story or something. For the rest of the pages squid will just fetch and return normally and should not affect the site's operation.

7: Response to AOLServer support HTTP 1.1 Pipelining (response to 1)

Posted by Jonathan Ellis on 05/16/02 07:22 PM

carnageblender.com serves over 100k pages a day with rl_returnz. No problems since I worked around the bug in IE >= 5. Jerry's tarball has this applied.

8: Response to AOLServer support HTTP 1.1 Pipelining (response to 1)

Posted by Jerry Asher on 05/16/02 07:33 PM

Oh, and I am pretty sure that mydomain's "aolserver gzip" is in reality rlreturnz in action. So that's three sites using it for some extended period of time, under reasonably heavy traffic.

9: Response to AOLServer support HTTP 1.1 Pipelining (response to 1)

Posted by Jerry Asher on 05/16/02 07:34 PM

And answering Joel's original question, AOLserver 3 is an HTTP 1.0 server, and it does not support HTTP 1.1 pipelining. I don't know if they've rolled that into AOLserver 4.

10: Response to AOLServer support HTTP 1.1 Pipelining (response to 1)

Posted by Jens Strupp on 05/17/02 11:06 AM

Hi,

does rlreturngz work with AOLserver 3.4.2, or better, is there a
version of it out there in the net?

I would like to test it with different browsers in a mixed
Environment (MAC/PC).

Compiling works but the server says:

Warning: modload: failed to load
'/usr/local/aolserver/bin/rlreturnz.so':
'/usr/local/aolserver/bin/rlreturnz.so: undefined symbol:
Ns_ConnReturnRawData'

Thanks,
Bernd.

11: Re: AOLServer support HTTP 1.1 Pipelining (response to 1)

Posted by Wolfgang Winkler on 11/28/02 06:07 PM

Hi!

Where can I download the rl_returnz module. The ashergroup link doesn't seem to work anymore. Has someone already tried it with aolserver 3.4 or 3.5.

Thanks!

12: Re: AOLServer support HTTP 1.1 Pipelining (response to 1)

Posted by Jonathan Ellis on 11/29/02 05:38 PM

I uploaded a copy here. I've compiled it against nsd 3.5.1 just fine.