DISABLING :store-body t in the http parser. wow. no wonder performance was terrible on chunked uploads!!
scaling back some of the debugging. a lot of it (mainly printing out via babel) was causing errors on binary data, even if the log level didnt dictate output. replaced it with length of data instead of string data. should speed things up too. also, removed args from hook debug. dont think ive ever actually looked at it, and it spits too much data out on large requests uneccesarily.