Therefore, you have to explicitly consume or discard the entity.

Put another way: Streaming all the way through is a feature of Akka HTTP that allows consuming entities (and pulling them through the network) in a streaming fashion, and only on demand when the client is ready to consume the bytes. This is a feature, as it allows one only to consume the entity, and back-pressure servers/clients from overwhelming our application, possibly causing unnecessary buffering of the entity in memory. Specifically it means that: “ lack of consumption of the HTTP Entity, is signaled as back-pressure to the other side of the connection”. This has surprising implications if you are used to non-streaming / not-reactive HTTP clients.

Implications of the streaming nature of Request/Response EntitiesĪkka HTTP is streaming all the way through, which means that the back-pressure mechanisms enabled by Akka Streams are exposed through all layers–from the TCP layer, through the HTTP server, all the way up to the user-facing HttpRequest HttpRequest and HttpResponse HttpResponse and their HttpEntity HttpEntity APIs.

Impact client chunk