Hi all, I've recently written an HTTP proxy server for the Motorola E815 cell phone, based on Suzuki Hisao's "Tiny HTTP Proxy" (http:// www.okisoft.co.jp/esc/python/proxy/). This cell phone allows free Internet access if you change the default proxy server, but it has a severely buggy HTTP client implementation which will freeze if there's no Content-Length header. Basically, it's impossible to read normal web pages without some massaging of the headers.
So my proxy adds the correct Content-Length header and tweaks the response in a couple of other ways. It works great now, you can get the code from: http://tonquil.homeip.net/~dlenski/cellphoneproxy/ I've MIT licensed it. It works fine as a proxy for a "normal" web browser too! One of the things I had trouble with was getting decent speed out of this proxy. The original "Tiny HTTP Proxy" didn't support persistent connections... which seriously slows down web browsing with a proxy, since it essentially DOUBLES the number of TCP connections that need to be made for each page access. So my proxy *does* support persistent connections, using the standard Connection or non-standard Proxy-Connection headers to determine whether to keep the connection alive or not. It's still not perfect though... apparently sometimes a web browser will SAY that it wants to keep a connection alive, and then just drop it. The proxy normally runs in a multi-threaded mode, and it counts the number of times that each connection is reused, printing this when the RequestHandler.finish() method is eventually called. If I force the proxy to run in a single thread, and use it as a proxy for Firefox, it will freeze up after a few page requests... the proxy will wait around for a new request on the same socket that never comes. So, my question is... is there any way to improve on this? Is there a way to make BaseHTTPRequestHandler detect when its connection has been closed by the peer without waiting for a long timeout? Is there a way to get the browser to always reuse a connection when it says it's going to? Any advice on improving the code is appreciated! Thanks, Dan Lenski -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
