gzip content encoding

[Brian Lamar]

The OpenStack 1.0 API specification says that "Content-Encoding: gzip" is supported for requests and responses to the OpenStack API. Currently we don't do anything with Content-Encoding or Accept-Encoding, which is breaking the current API specification.

From the specification:

Request and response body data may be encoded with gzip compression in order to
accelerate interactive performance of API calls and responses. This is controlled using the
Accept-Encoding header on the request from the client and indicated by the Content-
Encoding header in the server response. Unless the header is explicitly set, encoding defaults
to disabled.

[Brian Lamar (blamar)]

I don't know that the correct place to have this feature is in Python. Many installations/deployments of OpenStack will be behind proxies such as Nginx and Apache. Both Nginx and Apache can provide this functionality much more efficiently than I will be able to with the simple implementation I have chosen.

Options:
1) Rackspace and anyone else will be able to provide gzip compatibility to meet spec through proxies such as Apache/Nginx.

2) Implement gzip compression as middleware in Nova, but don't implement streaming gzip support. All input and output would need to be buffered into memory, compressed, and returned. I believe this breaks PEP-333 spec (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0333/#middleware-handling-of-block-boundaries).

3) Implement gzip compression as middleware in Nova and support streaming. This implementation is quite complicated and could very well block other features from getting into the API. I don't believe this feature to be a critical one, so I could see this being taken out of the OpenStack API and be deployment-oriented.

Anyone give me a thought one way or the other?

[Thierry Carrez (ttx)]

Beware that "Opinion" is a closing status in LP, so it basically makes your bug disappear from the lists :) I've set it back to "Incomplete" so that it stays open until you get the external opinion you're looking for. You can also raise the question in the open discussion at the team meeting, or as a mailing-list thread...

[Brian Lamar (blamar)]

After asking the mailing list and conferring with others, this sort of thing is best handled at another level (other than the nova code base).