[5561] in www-talk@info.cern.ch

home help back first fref pref prev next nref lref last post

Re: holding connections open: a modest proposal

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Ludeman)
Tue Sep 13 20:19:06 1994

Date: Wed, 14 Sep 1994 02:12:15 +0200
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: johnl@microsoft.com
From: John Ludeman <johnl@microsoft.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>

----------
| From: Gavin Nicol  <gtn@ebt.com>
| To: Multiple recipients of list  <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
| Subject: Re: holding connections open: a modest proposal
| Date: Tuesday, September 13, 1994 5:22PM
|
| >Briefly, keeping the connection open requires the server to commit
| >resources until timeout or explicit quit, reducing the number of
| >connections that can be made at one time and reducing the throughput.
|
| This is true, one can architecture servers such that things like file
| handle limits do not apply, but there is still an increase in CPU
| usage when connections are left open. I have never measured the
| different loads, but I would guess that the overhead of having open
| connections, and the overhead of multiplt connections/terminations is
| much the same.

No, you pay a lot for session setup and tear down.  You pay in CPU 
cycles and resources on the server.  You pay in wasted network 
throughput for the client which is *extremely* costly on slow links 
(aka modem) especially with the ever growing set of  hypermedia 
documents that have lots of little graphics.

A server that is taking up a large portion of CPU on a non-active 
connected socket is a server that should be replaced.

John

home help back first fref pref prev next nref lref last post