--http-debug shows incorrect "Accept-Encoding"

[kkeranen]

When not explicitly initializing Accept-Encoding field in HTTP request header, k6 or Go runtime implicitly adds Accept-Encoding: identity, which is fine. But not fine at all is that --http-debug option of k6 shows Accept-Encoding: gzip. I have wasted dozens of hours on this problem because I used to trust k6 debug info. A lot of this wasted time went just being able to get a proof by Fiddler, which I was finally able to get working with k6.

My related opening at community.k6.io.

Possibly related issue

[na--]

Sorry for the frustration with this, unfortunately you are completely right again, this is a bug. Here's a demo script that confirms it:

import http from "k6/http";

export default function () {
    let resp = http.get("http://httpbin.org/anything")
    console.log(resp.body)
}

Running that script with k6 0.24.0 and the --http-debug CLI flag produces something like this:

Request:
GET /anything HTTP/1.1
Host: httpbin.org
User-Agent: k6/0.24.0 (https://k6.io/)
Accept-Encoding: gzip

But the console.log() message shows that httpbin.org receives only the following headers:

"headers": {
    "Host": "httpbin.org", 
    "User-Agent": "k6/0.24.0 (https://k6.io/)"
}, 

I still don't see what's causing the issue. We may have to open an upstream Golang bug report for this, since k6 is simply using the httputil.DumpRequestOut() Go helper function 😕

@kkeranen, where did you notice the Accept-Encoding: identity header? Can you share an example, since in my case, it doesn't seem to be present.

[kkeranen]

I got Accept-Encoding: identity with Fiddler, but I was using k6 v0.22.1 in that test. I am assuming that k6 v0.24 behaves similarly, because the behavior is quite similar in both cases. I have v0.24 in Ubuntu and v0.22.1 in Windows 10, and got Fiddler more easily working with Windows 10.

[na--]

The reason for the issue seems to be that Go's httputil.DumpRequestOut() just adds that header by default, probably to emulate the way http.DefaultTransport behaves. But k6 uses a custom http.Transport, which doesn't send the header, thus causing the mismatch.

This still seems like a Golang bug, but it's more a case of bad APIs, so I can't see a way for it to be fixed 😕... Potentially connected Go issue: golang/go#29607 (dead, unfortunately)

[na--]

And it's not even using the DefaultTransport, it's creating its own internal one 🤦‍♂️

Anyway, I'm not sure what the best way for this to be fixed on the k6 side is 😕 The obvious solution is that we ditch httputil.DumpRequestOut() and write something ourselves. This seems almost inevitable, since I don't think this could be fixed on the Go side, and we can also close #986 and #774.

Also, it seems to me that the current k6 architecture (where we dump the request before we send it) should also be changed. Besides the accept-encoding issue you found out, it won't allow us to determine if a request is going to be sent via HTTP/1.1 or HTTP2, any redirects that would happen, NTLM authentication, etc.

Instead, k6 should likely "inject" the HTTP request dumping in a manner closer to what you've done with Fiddler - by "listening" to the actual requests being sent and received. That could happen through something like the httputil.ReveseProxy or, more likely, through injecting another http.RoundTripper at the bottom of the stack that logs all HTTP requests and responses.

[kkeranen]

Well, I don't need to be fixed. It's enough that I know how it works. Therefore I suggest documenting this special feature so that others don't get confused and waste time investigating this. After all, k6 is performance testing tool and disabling/enabling compression is probably of great interest to k6 users.

Maybe this header problem was made worse by incorrect reception timing because it seems to affect the duration timing, too. I make a more detailed comment into that issue.

[jberryman]

k6 or Go runtime implicitly adds Accept-Encoding: identity, which is fine

aside: just making sure if I set ...identity;q=0 we override this? Otherwise not fine

[mstoykov]

@jberryman the stdlib will not set Accept-Encoding, if it is already set. It also will be correctly reported by --http-debug.

Please though use the community forum for pure questins to not muddle the issues ;)