Best way to deal with long-running requests?

[Ryan Noon]

Hi everybody,

I'm kinda new to async web servers.  I just started playing with webbit (via webbit-rest) and I'm having difficulty in processing simultaneous requests that take a while.

I know I'm not supposed to block in the handler, so I wrote an example like this:

https://gist.github.com/4122309

In this case, I'm creating a worker thread to simulate doing something expensive (like a DB call) and I'm passing a runnable to the NettyServer's executor when done to set the response body and "end" it.

However, when I make two requests at the same time, the spread across them is 4 seconds (instead of the expected 2), even though the handleHttpRequest method in both returns immediately.  Is there any way to get the webbit server to do two things at once, or must all requests be processed entirely in-order?

[Ryan Noon]

Ok, so I figured it out and the answer is quite stupid.  Everything's fine with webbit.

It's a Chrome HTTP optimization.  It will queue up requests from different tabs/windows for the same URL so as to only actually have 1 in flight at a time.  Doing the request manually with telnet worked just fine.

Lesson: avoid debugging a complicated piece of software with an even more complicated piece of software.

[aslak hellesoy]

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 12:14 PM, Ryan Noon <rmn...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ok, so I figured it out and the answer is quite stupid.  Everything's fine with webbit.

It's a Chrome HTTP optimization.  It will queue up requests from different tabs/windows for the same URL so as to only actually have 1 in flight at a time.  Doing the request manually with telnet worked just fine.

Lesson: avoid debugging a complicated piece of software with an even more complicated piece of software.

Thanks for the update Ryan. I did take a glance at your code and nothing wrong jumped out at me. Glad you found the cause.

Aslak