[squid-users] Squid and compression

[Amos Jeffries]

On 27/08/2015 8:50 a.m., Yuri Voinov wrote:
> 
> Btw,
> 
> when Squid will directly support gzip, inflate compression itself?

Thats a tough question. "When someone does it." is the sadly true cliche.

Transfer-Encoding with gzip is what Squid as a proxy is actually
expected to do by the protocol. But neither Squid nor most other
software implement it so its not got much demand. I'm working on it as a
hobby task and a favour for a customer who cant get signoff on big costs
for such a low-gain feature. So small steps at a time and still a ways
off at this rate.
 (exactly *when* is sponsor dependent. Anyone want to front up a few
weeks or months of full-time developer paycheck to see it happen by Jan
2016 or some deadline like that?)


But what most of you are talking about with this gzip question is
actually Content-Encoding:gzip as used by browser and origin servers.
Recoding that on the fly is content adaptation. An eCAP service plugin
already exists and was the right way to go IMHO. I'm not sure what
happend to the plugins author. Theres still lots of optimization stuff
to be done in that area.

Normalizing the Accept headers before Vary processing is simpler change.
But again needs someone interested in doing it, and is possibly better
suited to the eCAP adaper doing in prep for its reply transformations.
This Vary stuff does have a fair few bugs and missing bits so its not
quite clean sailing or would have happened years ago.


So lots to be done. But nobody with money has enough interest right now
in seeing it happen. Whats the phrase, "free as in freedom, not beer".

Amos