Re: [boost] [ann] Urdl - a library for downloading web content

I'm still not 100% sure which bit you're referring to, but if you mean the asio::streambuf usage in http_read_stream, that's just to keep the implementation simple. Any overhead there only applies to receiving the headers, and isn't incurred once you start downloading the content.

In this design you use a buffered stream so you can check for the status line, headers and body using read_until. A different approach, which I have used in to try to decode the data as it arrives (without a buffered stream).