some curiousity - HTTP server replies with 413 instead of 405 on PROPFIND request
Oliver-Rainer Wittmann
during testing the integration of serf into Apache Open Office (AOO) I have
observed the following somehow curious behavior:
After having retrieved a search result - an HTML document - using a POST request
on http://wiki.services.openoffice.org I observed that the images and links
included in the HTML document are retrieved very slow.
Further investigation reveals that the HTTP server replies with a delay of 1-2
seconds on PROPFIND request with HTTP status code 413 instead of 405. The AOO
implementation wrapping the used HTTP/WebDAV client library uses a PROPFIND
request to figure out, if a certain resource is a DAV resource and if the DAV
resource is a collection or not. Thus, for each URL such a request is submitted
to the corresponding server containing a body in order to retrieve certain
property values. The reason for this seems to be used request header
<Transfer-Encoding : chunked> and the corresponding chunked encoding - see serf
function <serialize_data(serf_bucket_t *bucket)>
If I skip the setting of this request header and the chunked encoding the HTTP
server replies without a delay with HTTP status code 405
You can reproduce the behavior with the following URL:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/w/ASFLogo/asf_logo_simple.png
Do you have any deeper insight why this happens?
Would it be possible to make the usage of the chunked transfer encoding optional
- may be by serf_request or by serf_connection or by serf_context?
Thanks in advance, Oliver