are Range requests for dynamic content supported?

[David van Geest]

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 2:42 PM, Lukas Tribus <luky-37 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The HTTP client in
>> this case is (always) a very particular embedded device with limited
>> resources and a constrained operating environment.
>
> Ok, so this is about working around a broken user-agent. I assume the vendor of that embedded device can't fix the crashing client?

Correct :-).

> How do you force the client to request the content in Byte-Ranges and not at once? Even if you are serving static files from the server (where nginx can provide most of the HTTP/1.1 features), the client actually needs to request it that way.

The developer of the embedded application has some control over the
HTTP requests, and thinks he can force it to use Byte-Ranges.

>> It has yet to be seen whether this
>> will solve the client crashing issues, so for now I'm going to leave
>> it.
>
> Meaning you still aren't sure whether range support will fix your client crashing issue? I would look for other workarounds, like heavy gzipping, (if x/html) minifying and outsourcing as much as possible in other files (css and stuff), etc. You already implemented checksumming on the client-side, maybe you can implement some segmenting in the application code as well, instead of relaying on HTTP to do that job via Range requests.

Right.  Gzipping may be another option... the response is purely JSON,
but should be very compressible.  The question would probably come
down to space on the embedded device for a gzip library (sigh...).  We
want to avoid large application changes but segmenting there is
another option.  Thanks for the suggestions!