[PATCH] httpd: add option to send files using gzip content-encoding if available

[Peter Korsgaard]

>>>>> "beebee" == beebee  <beebee at piments.com> writes:

Hi,

 beebee> while it may take a few lines more code to check and maintain a cache
 beebee> the runtime overhead would be minimal compared to the overhead of
 beebee> gzipping files each and every time they are requested.
 >> 
 >> But the point of my implementation is NOT to gzip for every request,
 >> only once manually when a file is added/edited.

 beebee> Yes I realised that, I was continuing from my earlier observation that
 beebee> it may make more sense to adopt the lighttpd approach to this and do
 beebee> the gzip to cache once.

Once? This implementation also only does the gzip once.

 beebee> This would seem to imply a trivial amount of extra code and would
 beebee> avoid the need to "find".

If you would like something that automatically generates the gzip
variants when files are changed, then I think that could fairly easily
be done using busybox's inotifyd and a shell script.

 beebee> What is the slowdown overhead going to be doing that find
 beebee> command for every single request if the directory has a lot of
 beebee> files. This may well be the case and cannot be precluded.

I'm not sure I'm getting you. Httpd never runs the find script I
mentioned above, the idea is that you can run it manually when you want
to update the cache - Not something that is done for each request.

 beebee> It just feels a  bit unfinished to expect the user to maintain gz
 beebee> files manually on each update of the source file. He also has to be
 beebee> made aware of how this feature works to insure he does that.

A lot of embedded webservers have very static content, but we could ship
an example script like we do for indexcgi and post_upload.

-- 
Bye, Peter Korsgaard