nodejs / nodejs/undici

Improve Keep-Alive

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#1,861 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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enhancement Status: help-wanted
Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
7.7k
Forks
880
Avg merge
2d 16h
Merged PRs (30d)
68

Description

llhttp will in certain edge cases (e.g. HEAD, 204, 304) not allow keep-alive to avoid undetectable parsing failures which can lead to data corruption. These can occur when the target server does not properly implement the HTTP/1.1 specification and this is not entirely uncommon.

However, when the target server is known to be spec compliant, this can lead to performance degradation. A typical case for this is when building a microservice architecture where the different services communicate over HTTP/1.1, and the target server is known.

We recently fixed the case for HEAD requests, but more work can be done here.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with llhttp's src/native/http.c at the keep-alive handling referenced in the issue, then review the linked undici pull request for the existing HEAD-request change. Determine the expected behavior for 204 and 304 responses and verify that the completed work preserves protection against parsing failures while allowing keep-alive for compliant targets.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
javascript, node.js
Domain
api, backend
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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