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Illusory latency due to trailing slash redirects

colecmac at protonmail.com colecmac at protonmail.com

Sat Jun 27 18:52:31 BST 2020

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I'm pretty sure it should besafe for clients to automatically append

trailing slashes to URLs without paths.

I've done this in Amfora, it makes typing in domains much simpler.

Currently, every redirect in Amfora must be confirmed by the user, butI wonder if it would make sense to automatically accept redirects thatjust add a slash, as a convenience thing. I would need to add some logicthat prevents a redirect hell of course.

makeworld

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐On Saturday, June 27, 2020 4:57 AM, solderpunk <solderpunk at SDF.ORG> wrote:

I sent the following email (and many others, which will follow shortly)

to the list last night, but SDF's mailserver was acting up and they

never went through. I thought they'd appear eventually, but it appears

not, so I'm resending them now. Apologies if double posts eventually

appear.

----- Forwarded message from solderpunk solderpunk at SDF.ORG -----

Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2020 15:47:57 +0000

From: solderpunk solderpunk at SDF.ORG

To: gemini at lists.orbitalfox.eu

Subject: Illusory latency due to trailing slash redirects

Gemini servers (and servers for any other protocol supporting relative

URLs, including HTTP) will use redirects to get clients to add a

trailing slash to a URL which maps to a directory on the server's

filesystem. Handling this redirect is often invisible to the client

user, with the result that what "looks and feels" like a single request

is actually two immediately consecutive requests. This makes latency

appear to be much worse than it actually is. Perhaps this underlies

some people's perceptions that Gemini has unacceptable latency.

This basic problem is unavoidable, but there are many small things

client and server authors can do to minimise how often it happens:

In general, the client can't add a missing trailing slash itself because

it never knows if a given URL maps to something file-like or something

directory-like. An interesting exception is the root of the server.

Molly Brown and Jetforce (but not GLV-1.12556) both seem to redirect

gemini.example.com to gemini.example.com/, making the loading of

"homepages" feel slower than it needs to. I'm pretty sure it should be

safe for clients to automatically append trailing slashes to URLs

without paths.

On the server side, server authors should take care when doing things

like automatically generating directory listings to put trailing slashes

in links to directories so that the redirect is not necessary.

These measures together could cut perceived latency in half for a

non-trivial proportion of Gemini requests, including the psychologically

heavily weighted request of visiting a server's homepage.

Cheers,

Solderpunk