[Haskell-cafe] Re: PROPOSAL: Web application interface

[Bardur Arantsson]

Michael Snoyman wrote:

[--snip--]
> Next, I have made the ResponseBodyClass typeclass specifically with the goal
> of allowing optimizations for lazy bytestrings and sending files. The former
> seems far-fetched; the latter provides the ability to use a sendfile system
> call instead of copying the file data into memory. However, in the presence
> of gzip encoding, how useful is this optimization?
[--snip--]

I'm hoping that the "Web" bit in your project title doesn't literally 
mean that WAI is meant to be restricted to solely serving content to 
browsers. With that caveat in mind:

For non-WWW HTTP servers it can be extremely useful to have sendfile. An 
example is my Haskell UPnP Media Server (hums) application. It's sending 
huge files (AVIs, MP4s, etc.) over the network and since these files are 
already compressed as much as they're ever going to be, gzip would be 
useless. The CPU load of my hums server went from 2-5% to 0% when 
streaming files just from switching from a Haskell I/O based solution to 
proper sendfile.

Lack of proper support for sendfile() was indeed one of the reasons that 
I chose to roll my own HTTP server for hums. I should note that this was 
quite a while ago and I haven't really gone back to reevaluate that 
choice -- there's too many HTTP stacks to choose from right now and I 
don't have the time to properly evaluate them all.

For this type of server, response *streaming* is also extremely 
important for those cases where you cannot use sendfile, so I'd hate to 
see a standard WAI interface preclude that. (No, lazy I/O is NOT an 
option -- the HTTP clients in a typical UPnP media client behave so 
badly that you'll run out of file descriptors in no time. Trust me, I've 
tried.)

Cheers,