On 09/17/2013 03:08 PM, Jeremy Shaw wrote:
Hello,
Is it valid for a server to start sending an HTTP Response before the Request has been entirely consumed? Or to put it differently, is there any case where it would be valid for the Response message-body to be streaming the value from the Request message-body?
I don't know about valid from a "standards" point of view, but a valid use case, yes. For some reason or other, you are able to determine early that you do not care to answer this request, and you want to drop it or return an error as rapidly as possible. For instance, if a particular page is getting DOS'ed, part of your mitigation strategy might be to bail out of any request for that page as early as possible, or if it's because a particular page is being over-accessed you might want to return a static snapshot ASAP and get on with the next request. Or based on IPs, or whoknows what. I think you're right that returning a 200 before you've seen the entire header is probably never a good idea, but there are many 4xx and 5xx series responses you can make.