SPDY: what is the purpose of blocked frame

[Valentin V. Bartenev]

On Tuesday 25 June 2013 12:51:17 Yury Kirpichev wrote:
> Hi Nginx Developers,
> 
> 
> Could someone explain what is the purpose to use blocked frame for
> SYN_REPLY frame in spdy implementation?
> 
> According to our investigation it makes it impossible to use spdy
> priorities because of blocked frames (since each stream is started with
> SYN_REPLY which is blocked there is no way how frames from subsequent
> requests can outrun previous request with lower priority in spdy output
> queue).
> 
[...]

SPDY uses zlib compression for output headers in SYN_REPLY frames.
In fact zlib is just a wrapper over deflate compression that consists
of LZ77 and Huffman coding.

Both client and server must keep LZ77 window in sync between each
other across a whole SPDY session, so the order of SYN_REPLY frames
cannot be changed after the compression has done.

There is a way to improve things a bit.  We may postpone compression
to the latest phase (right before sending of queue), but it requires
more code and we have no ETA for this yet.

  wbr, Valentin V. Bartenev