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apache/arrow-experiments/HEAD/./http/get_compressed/curl/client
tree: ab2694fa7cf03498c7f3a4660385bf5a7df9d5cc [path history] [tgz]
  1. client.sh
  2. README.md
http/get_compressed/curl/client/README.md

HTTP GET Arrow Data: Compressed Arrow Data Examples

This directory contains a simple curl script that issues multiple HTTP GET requests to the server implemented in the parent directory, negotiating different compression algorithms for the Arrow IPC stream data piping the output to different files with extensions that indicate the compression algorithm used.

To run this example, first start one of the server examples in the parent directory, then run the client.sh script.

You can check all the sizes with a simple command:

$ du -sh out* | sort -gr
816M    out.arrows
804M    out_from_chunked.arrows
418M    out_from_chunked.arrows+lz4
405M    out.arrows+lz4
257M    out.arrows.gz
256M    out_from_chunked.arrows.gz
229M    out_from_chunked.arrows+zstd
229M    out.arrows+zstd
220M    out.arrows.zstd
219M    out_from_chunked.arrows.zstd
 39M    out_from_chunked.arrows.br
 38M    out.arrows.br

[!WARNING] Better compression is not the only relevant metric as it might come with a trade-off in terms of CPU usage. The best compression algorithm for your use case will depend on your specific requirements.

Meaning of the file extensions

Files produced by HTTP/1.0 requests are not chunked, they get buffered in memory at the server before being sent to the client. If compressed, they end up slightly smaller than the results of chunked responses, but the extra delay for first byte is not worth it in most cases.

  • out.arrows (Uncompressed)

  • out.arrows.gz (Gzip HTTP compression)

  • out.arrows.zstd (Zstandard HTTP compression)

  • out.arrows.br (Brotli HTTP compression)

  • out.arrows+zstd (Zstandard IPC compression)

  • out.arrows+lz4 (LZ4 IPC compression)

HTTP/1.1 requests are returned by the server with Transfer-Encoding: chunked to send the data in smaller chunks that are sent to the socket as soon as they are ready. This is useful for large responses that take a long time to generate at the cost of a small overhead caused by the independent compression of each chunk.

  • out_from_chunked.arrows (Uncompressed)

  • out_from_chunked.arrows.gz (Gzip HTTP compression)

  • out_from_chunked.arrows.zstd (Zstandard HTTP compression)

  • out_from_chunked.arrows.br (Brotli HTTP compression)

  • out_from_chunked.arrows+lz4 (LZ4 IPC compression)

  • out_from_chunked.arrows+zstd (Zstandard IPC compression)