Google HTTP Load Balancer and chunked transfer encoding

[Michal Witkowski]

We're experimenting with putting a service, which returns HTTP Chunked Transfer encoding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunked_transfer_encoding), behind the Google Cloud GFEs (HTTP Load Balancer).

The normal (that return with "Content-Length" body) endpoints of the same Backend Service work as intended. As such, this doesn't seem to be a healthchecking or a configuration issue on our part.

However, for endpoints that return "Transfer-encoding: chunked", the response is:

HTTP 502 

Error: Server Error

The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.

Please try again in 30 seconds.

Do Google HTTP Load Balancers not support Chunked responses? It'd be weird as the HTTP 1.1 Spec (published in June 1999) states: 

 All HTTP/1.1 applications MUST be able to receive and decode the

   "chunked" transfer-coding, and MUST ignore chunk-extension extensions

   they do not understand.

Are we missing some configuration option?

Thanks,

Michal

Head of Infrastructure

Improbable

[Kamran (Google Cloud Support)]

Hi Michal,

Can you post your HTTP request's header, or an equivalent curl command that can reproduce the issue? I just tested a post request on HTTP load balancer with setting "Transfer-encoding: chunked" and I'm not getting any errors:

$ curl -vvv -H "Transfer-encoding: chunked" --data "param1=value1&param2=value2" http://107.178.X.X

* About to connect() to 107.178.X.X port 80 (#0)

*   Trying 107.178.X.X...

* Connected to 107.178.X.X (107.178.X.X) port 80 (#0)

> POST / HTTP/1.1

> User-Agent: curl/7.29.0

> Host: 107.178.X.X

> Accept: */*

> Transfer-encoding: chunked

> Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

>

> 1b

* upload completely sent off: 34 out of 27 bytes

< HTTP/1.1 200 OK

< Server: nginx/1.6.2

< Date: Sat, 17 Oct 2015 02:20:38 GMT

< Content-Type: text/html

< Content-Length: 867

< Last-Modified: Thu, 17 Sep 2015 14:24:25 GMT

< ETag: "55facd19-363"

< Accept-Ranges: bytes

< Via: 1.1 google

<

..........

.........

Sincerely,

Kamran