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

[Michael Snoyman]

On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 1:23 PM, Bardur Arantsson <spam at scientician.net>wrote:

> 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.)
>
> Both sendfile and response streaming are in the top priorities in the WAI
proposal. As far as "web," I think the term is just a synonym for HTTP here.

I'd be especially interested to hear input from people using Haskell for
non-standard HTTP applications, because I want WAI to be as general as
possible. Please let me know if you see anything that you would like added.
The code is all available at http://github.com/snoyberg/wai

Michael
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