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HTTP Headers For Fun & Profit

loopj.com

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Re: HTTP Headers For Fun & Profit

#12

Post by ashray »

Is this not a terrible waste of bandwidth though ? At about 10 bytes per header (on the low end..) and say 100 million requests per day, that amounts to 1Gb of outbound bandwidth, if you count inbound bandwidth then that comes to 2gb in total. Not to mention the cumulative time spent by users downloading those bytes, thereby delaying resource display.

Okay, I see that I sucked the fun out of it :P

Re: HTTP Headers For Fun & Profit

#13

Post by olalonde »

ashray wrote: post #12

Is this not a terrible waste of bandwidth though ? At about 10 bytes per header (on the low end..) and say 100 million requests per day, that amounts to 1Gb of outbound bandwidth, if you count inbound bandwidth then that comes to 2gb in total. Not to mention the cumulative time spent by users downloading those bytes, thereby delaying resource display. Okay, I see that I sucked the fun out of it :P

Maybe they're just sending the headers for user-agent "curl"?

Re: HTTP Headers For Fun & Profit

#14

Post by DanWaterworth »

dfc wrote: post #9
jorde wrote: post #2

Interestingly IETF discourages the use of X prefixed headers but they might still suite this kind of behavior http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6648

I'm sorry if this is obvious. What does the verb "to suite" mean? *I'm not trying to be pedantic, genuinely curious if it is a word I do not know.

I think "suit" was intended.

Re: HTTP Headers For Fun & Profit

#15

Post by jacques_chester »

jkbr wrote: post #11
jorde wrote: post #2

Interestingly IETF discourages the use of X prefixed headers but they might still suite this kind of behavior http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6648

It's a very recent RFC from June 2012.

It was promoted from Draft with great celerity. I think they'd like it if folk stopped using X- sort of nowish.

Edit: on second thoughts, it's the IETF, they always move quick. And it's not as though this was a particularly thorny protocol or anything.

Re: HTTP Headers For Fun & Profit

#16

Post by afandian »

laumars wrote: post #10
afandian wrote: post #6

What the hell is going on with those expand-on-hover boxes that you need to move your mouse to see? Who thought that was a good idea?

Agreed. It took me about 30 seconds to work out how to view the content (so long I nearly gave up and closed the page. The problem I had was that I couldn't scroll. I ended up having to maximize my browser (Opera) to read them as every time I move my mouse to the scroll bar, they'd shrink again (same problem with using the mouse scroll wheel). I can't image trying to read those boxes on a tablet where I don't even ha…

I tried on my Android. If you click on the boxen they embiggen. It's not much better than having to mouseover.

Re: HTTP Headers For Fun & Profit

#18

Post by Jabbles »

ashray wrote: post #12

Is this not a terrible waste of bandwidth though ? At about 10 bytes per header (on the low end..) and say 100 million requests per day, that amounts to 1Gb of outbound bandwidth, if you count inbound bandwidth then that comes to 2gb in total. Not to mention the cumulative time spent by users downloading those bytes, thereby delaying resource display. Okay, I see that I sucked the fun out of it :P

How many software engineers do you need to recruit via your http headers to offset the bandwidth costs?

pinterest.com seems to download ~700kB. Adding amusing http headers seems negligible.

Re: HTTP Headers For Fun & Profit

#19

Post by buttscicles »

nwh wrote: post #4

There's also a lot of fun robots.txt. I forget where it was mentioned (I didn't find it myself) but this one always made me laugh: # robots.txt for http://www.palm.com/ modified 7/28/09 User-agent: Vampires Disallow: /neck

From reddit.com:

    User-Agent: bender
    Disallow: /my_shiny_metal_ass

    User-Agent: Gort
    Disallow: /earth
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