Send content-length header

[bmccoy11]

Why isn't the content-length header set by default? It looks like it was disabled back when the new Varnish caching system was enabled, and I can't find a way to re-enable it. Disabling the Varnish cache via .htaccess didn't help. Does anyone know how to enable it?

 

[leafypiggy]

Content length is set and returned by Varnish.

Where are you seeing that it is not?

 

[bmccoy11]

Try https://i.bmccoy.cf/sampletext.txt . No content length header is sent when I try to download anything, and Peerr5 won't work when the content-length header isn't set. (please note that I'm not using this for file hosting, just for downloadable image galleries related to my website.)

 

[leafypiggy]

That would be because you're behind cloudflare. Varnish/Apache on the server are returning a content-length for the file.

 

[bmccoy11]

I turned off Cloudflare and I'm still not getting a content-length header.

 

[AngusThermopyle]

Accept-Ranges    bytes, bytes
Age    0
Cache-Control    max-age=0, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate
Connection    keep-alive
Content-Length    364
Content-Type    text/plain
Date    Thu, 05 Mar 2015 00:14:48 GMT
Last-Modified    Wed, 04 Mar 2015 19:59:59 GMT
X-Cache    MISS
X-Varnish    14899040
access-control-allow-orig...    *

The headers I just got.
Try again, and if you still don't get content-length, ping your site and make sure you are not still going through Cloudflare (your site should resolve to IP 198.91.81.3)

 

[bmccoy11]

I'm still not receiving any content-length headers. Cloudflare is completely off and the subdomain is resolving to 198.91.81.3.

Edit: It looks like some files are returning content-length headers, while some others are not. Weird.

 

[AngusThermopyle]

Does it correspond to the value of X-Cache (ie HIT vs MISS) ?
I just retried that file and got a cache HIT that did not have the content-length

 

[bmccoy11]

No, it does not correspond to that. I just tried one that got a cache MISS and didn't have the content-length header either.

 

[AngusThermopyle]

Googling "varnish headers content length" seems to indicate it is/was an issue with Varnish. Not sure if it was ever resolved.

 

[bmccoy11]

I followed x10Hosting's instructions to disable Varnish, I guess that didn't work. Hm.

https://community.x10hosting.com/th...d-content-length-header-for-php-files.195228/

 

[Skizzerz]

I think your cache disabling bit is working for me because I cannot get any cache hits on that file (they always miss). That said, check the Transfer-Encoding header whenever you see Content-Length missing -- if Transfer-Encoding is set to chunked, then Content-Length cannot be specified (it is actually in violation of the HTTP spec to do so). It is possible that Varnish is chunking cached files and that is why you are not seeing the header. If that is the case, fix whatever app you are using to suck less and actually conform to the HTTP spec (or do your requests in HTTP/1.0 where chunking isn't a thing)

 

[bmccoy11]

I just fixed the line to disable caching in .htaccess, I was actually missing a value. Here's the app I'm using, by the way.

 

[bmccoy11]

Sorry if that came off wrong... My problem still isn't fixed. I just added one thing to my .htaccess file so X-Cache returns MISS every time. I also tried downgrading to HTTP 1.0 and disabled gzip, which still didn't fix the chunking.

 

[leafypiggy]

What is an example link that is not showing a content length? Your previous link is not loading.

 

[bmccoy11]

http://i.bmccoy.cf/sampletext.txt (HTTPS is disabled when Cloudflare is off)

http://i.bmccoy.cf/Test-10MB-File.bin and http://i.bmccoy.cf/samplefile.exe don't return any content headers either.

 

[leafypiggy]

I would recommend that you manually set the content-length headers for these files by serving them using a PHP redirect. It is obvious that the script you are using is unable to deal with chunked encoding, and beyond what we've already tried (namely disabling gzip and attempting to force http-1.0) there is not much else we can do. @Skizzerz might have another suggestion.

 

[bmccoy11]

Here's my .htaccess file.

#
# DIRECTORY LISTING
#

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php /.h5ai/server/php/index.php

Options -Indexes

#
# PEER5 SUPPORT
#

Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"

#
# DISABLE CACHING
#

Header set Cache-Control "max-age=0, private, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"


#
# NO CHUNKING
#

RewriteRule . - [E=no-gzip:1]
SetEnv downgrade-1.0

 

[bmccoy11]

Okay, so in case anyone else is having this issue, I've figured it out. Varnish Cache is falsely adding the Transfer-Encoding: Chunked header to a lot of files while removing the content-length header, even when the payload isn't chunked. The bug has been around for a while, and Varnish still hasn't fixed it. Currently, the only way around it is to use port 82 to bypass Varnish completely. x10Hosting has a Varnish cPanel plugin in development which may or may not let users completely disable Varnish, which will probably be released a long time from now.