From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2003-04-04T03:08:07+09:00
Subject: Re: cgi serving xml from Apache problem

On Fri, Apr 04, 2003 at 02:45:16AM +0900, Chris Morris wrote:
> Seems this change fixed it:
> 
>      def output_feed
>        print "Content-type: text/xml\n\n"
>        $stdout.flush
>        print rss_xml
>        $stdout.flush
>      end
> 
> Without the flush, I guess Apache was aware that the output may not be done
> and automatically went into 'chunked' mode.
> 
> With the flush, 'Transfer-encoded: chunked' is not used and the XML comes
> across clean.

It shouldn't cause a problem though. RFC2616 again:

   All HTTP/1.1 applications MUST be able to receive and decode the
   "chunked" transfer-coding

If the client was making a HTTP/1.0 request then possibly Apache should not
be using this transfer-coding, so you might want to dig around there a bit
more. Flushing stdout a few times is a rather dubious way to solve this if
it is indeed a problem; you may find it reappears again when your dataset
gets a bit larger!

Chunked encoding saves the server having to buffer your entire CGI output
just so that it can create a correct Content-Length: header.

Regards,

Brian.