[6772] in www-talk@info.cern.ch

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Re: More on HTTP-NG timings

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Simon E Spero)
Tue Nov 22 15:08:22 1994

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 1994 20:52:44 +0100
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: ses@tipper.oit.unc.edu
From: Simon E Spero <ses@tipper.oit.unc.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>

   koblas@netcom.com (David Koblas) writes:
>
>I have a few issues with HTTP-NG, on on a protocol level it didn't appear
>as if there was a PROTOCOL-VERSION byte in the headers.  Such things like
>this are always important.

Actually, there was no protocol information at all in the documents posted :-)
That's all in the protocol spec, rather than the architectural overview.. 
A Draft of the spec will be out before the BOF - honest :-)
The current protocol-level options don't use version numbers; instead, they 
use capabilities. This is similar to the gnu style autoconf approach of 
finding out what features a machine supports, instead of using the system 
name to look up the feature list in a table).

>A) Over the Internet transfering 5 10MB files simultaniously is better
>done with 5 .. 20 TCP connections.  Becuase, if one TCP packet is lost
>only 1 TCP connection drops into a timeout<->resend cycle. 

This is true except... why did the one TCP packet get lost? Virtually all 
packet loss on the Internet is caused by congestion. (I'll need a bit to 
dig out the reference for the actual numbers, unless Dave Crocker knows them
off the top of his head?)
> 
> 
>I think the better thing to keep in mind with HTTP-NG is that is
>a control channel that can transmit data (MGETs...) but has mechanisms
>for allow easy creation of auxilariy data channels.  Sounds simple, 
>but it should be supportable from a library level.

I can't quite follow this - how does this differ from the mechanism I proposed,
which allows results to be either a session_id for data on this connection
or a url for a media specific transport connection. If the HTTP-NG connection
has reserved bandwidth, then it can split time between the data channels as
it sees fit. 

>Also, how does your benchmarking of HTTP-NG compare with HTTP supporting
>MGETs?  I would expect that they are within 10% of each other, since

I haven't done the comparison, but I'd expect around a 25%-30% differce for
a document with a few images. A lot depends on how MGET is spec-ed, how
big the HTML file is, and how big the icons are.

MGET (pure and simple)
connect, get foo.html, get-data, close, connect, mget *.gif, get data, close
HTTP-NG 
connect, get foo.hml, get-data, get *.gif get-data. close)

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