Reverse proxy to http 1.0 origin server

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1) I'd have a question on how to set up a reverse proxy to a http 1.0 in the cleanest most standard conforming way.

AFAIU, strict HTTP 1.0 has neither persistent connections / keep-alives
- a connection ends after a single request has been responded. Neither does it have Host: headers.

a) Do I need to tell the reverse-proxy about this? Do I have to set:
- ProxyPass' disablereuse=on and/or
- force-proxy-request-1.0 and/or
- proxy-nokeepalive and/or
- proxy-sendcl

Or is one of them enough? E.g. when I set force-proxy-request-1.0... all the others are implicitly set?

b) Do I need to set proxy-initial-not-pooled?
Cause I get the error mentioned there,... interestingly that seems to be independent of the backend/origin server... and dependent on the client.

c) So, strictly speaking, I could not use name-based vhosting, right?

2) Further, when a client talks to the reverse proxy in HTTP 1.0 it should get the reply in 1.0 either. And when it talk to it in 1.1, it should get it in 1.1.

Would Apache do this automatically, or would it answer a 1.0 request with a 1.1 response?
So do I have to set: force-response-1.0 ?

3) The origin server to which I connect is single threaded, i.e. it will only process one request at a time. So Apache shouldn't connect more than once concurrently, as it would simply block. How do I get this? The keep-alive options above probably don't help here... Is the solution to set ProxyPass' max=1 ?

posted Aug 5, 2013 by Abhay Kulkarni

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1 Answer

AFAIU, strict HTTP 1.0 has neither persistent connections / keep-alives
- a connection ends after a single request has been responded. Neither does it have Host: headers.

No, it has keepalives and Host headers. But the former are more limited than in 1.1 because there's no chunked encoding, and the latter are technically optional (though in practice pretty-much universal since about 1995 or 96).

a) Do I need to tell the reverse-proxy about this?

Try it and see what your backend is happy with! Chances are, the only thing you'll need to worry about
is to avoid sending it chunked encoding.

answer Aug 5, 2013 by Amit Parthsarthi

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