I agree that always sending content-length would be ideal, if it didn't come with the extra work and costs on the server that you mentioned. Chunked encoding i

I agree that always sending content-length would be ideal, if it didn't come with the extra work and costs on the server that you mentioned. Chunked encoding is simple enough to implement, avoids all those issues, and would allow a Gemini server to serve more requests faster given the same resources, or to run on hardware with more limited resources such as embedded. So I think it's well worth the slight cost in simplicity.