id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	resolution	keywords	cc	launchpad_bug
3939	HTTP protocol is significantly slower than Foolscap protocol	itamarst	GitHub <noreply@…>	"Specifically, in https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs/pull/1225, `test_filesystem` (from test_system.py) is 40 seconds with HTTP, compared to 20 with Foolscap.

Of those extra 20 seconds:

* 7 seconds are from repeated calls to `get_spki_hash()` in the HTTP client validation code. Or rather, the _real_ bottleneck is the call to get_public_bytes(), which is a little surprising but OK.
* Another 7 seconds or so are just the TLS handshake?!
* http_client's getContext() method to create a TLS context is also quite expensive, and there's some expense in creating context objects on the server.

The test setup doesn't use persistent connections, so this arguably unrealistic, and maybe tests should use persistent connections. This still seems... excessive. Perhaps we're doing way too many HTTP requests. E.g. maybe chunk sizes that are OK for Foolscap are too small for HTTP."	defect	closed	normal	HTTP Storage Protocol	unknown	n/a	fixed