"Andr�s Aguiar" wrote:
> Reading Jason Hunter's book and some posts, it seems that you should set the
> content-length method. This is true for any servlet?
>
Setting the content length is not mandatory, but it is a good idea.
>
> I mean, the content-length header tells the client how much content it will
> receive, so the client doesn't do another http request until all the data is
> received. If the servlet (as in Jason's book example) returns a simple page,
> why does setting the content-length improves the performance?
>
In the HTTP/1.0 protocol, each request occurs on a separate TCP connection.
There is some amount of overhead in establishing and releasing all these
connections.
If your servlet engine (or the web server it runs on) supports the HTTP/1.1
protocol, there is a mechanism that can keep a single TCP connection open so
that you can do several requests on it, without paying the overhead of creating
and destroying the connection every time. This is where the performance
benefit comes from. But it relies on knowing the content length of your
responses.
Even if you don't set the content length yourself, some servlet engines provide
a certain amount of buffering for the response. If the buffer has not yet been
filled when your servlet's service() method returns, and you haven't set the
content length yourself, the servlet engine can do it for you. Check the
documentation on your servlet engine to see if it does this, and if you can
control the size of the output buffer.
Craig McClanahan
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