[erlang-questions] Getting chunked responses with ibrowse

[Chris Hicks]

Hello all,

I've been playing around with ibrowse, trying to get chunked responses from
a server and the behavior I'm seeing isn't at all what I expect given the
documentation.

When I send the following request:

ibrowse:send_req(URL, [], get, [], [{stream_to, self()}]).

I get the headers back from the server immediately...and then no messages
after that, until the timeout message anyway. From what the documentation
says, I'd expect to just continue to get messages "as data arrives on the
socket" but this apparently isn't the case.

If I call stream_next(Request_id) nothing happens at all. However, if I
instead change the call to:

ibrowse:send_req(URL, [], get, [], [{stream_to, {self(), once}}]).

I get the headers, and then when I call stream_next(Request_id) I suddenly
begin to get the packets the server is sending.

Can anyone explain to me why I am seeing what I am seeing?

The use case I am trying to fulfill is that I connect to a server and get a
set of data back that describes the state of the server as a json object.
On any changes, which might not happen for a very long time (days/months),
a new set of data is streamed to the client. I would like to have one
process receiving multiple streams, from multiple servers, handling these
status changes. Is this possible, or will I need to spin up workers for
each stream and have them wait for new data, providing it to that central
process?
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