HTTP proxy server for Motorola E815 phone in Python

[Dan Lenski]

Hi all,
I've recently written an HTTP proxy server for the Motorola E815 cell
phone, based on Suzuki Hisao's "Tiny HTTP Proxy" (http://
www.okisoft.co.jp/esc/python/proxy/).  This cell phone allows free
Internet access if you change the default proxy server, but it has a
severely buggy HTTP client implementation which will freeze if there's
no Content-Length header.  Basically, it's impossible to read normal
web pages without some massaging of the headers.

So my proxy adds the correct Content-Length header and tweaks the
response in a couple of other ways.  It works great now, you can get
the code from: http://tonquil.homeip.net/~dlenski/cellphoneproxy/
I've MIT licensed it.  It works fine as a proxy for a "normal" web
browser too!

One of the things I had trouble with was getting decent speed out of
this proxy.  The original "Tiny HTTP Proxy" didn't support persistent
connections... which seriously slows down web browsing with a proxy,
since it essentially DOUBLES the number of TCP connections that need
to be made for each page access.  So my proxy *does* support
persistent connections, using the standard Connection or non-standard
Proxy-Connection headers to determine whether to keep the connection
alive or not.

It's still not perfect though... apparently sometimes a web browser
will SAY that it wants to keep a connection alive, and then just drop
it.  The proxy normally runs in a multi-threaded mode, and it counts
the number of times that each connection is reused, printing this when
the RequestHandler.finish() method is eventually called.  If I force
the proxy to run in a single thread, and use it as a proxy for
Firefox, it will freeze up after a few page requests... the proxy will
wait around for a new request on the same socket that never comes.

So, my question is... is there any way to improve on this?  Is there a
way to make BaseHTTPRequestHandler detect when its connection has been
closed by the peer without waiting for a long timeout?  Is there a way
to get the browser to always reuse a connection when it says it's
going to?  Any advice on improving the code is appreciated!

Thanks,
Dan Lenski