[7281] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
FTP or HTTP consumes more resources?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Daniel W. Connolly)
Sat Jan 21 09:30:28 1995
Date: Sat, 21 Jan 1995 14:51:00 +0100
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: connolly@hal.com
From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
I have long been under the impression that HTTP/gopher's
one-process-per-request, as opposed to FTP's one-process-per-session
technique allows the same class of machine to handle an order of
magnitude more HTTP clients than FTP clients, typically. For example,
most microcomputer labs encourage folks to use a gopher client rather
than an ftp client.
Recently, I had an email exchange with a system administrator who gave
data showing that using HTTP to serve an archive of data caused a
higher load on the machine, even though the actual net traffic served
was less.
Does anybody have any data or first-hand experience to share? Does
HTTP really fail to be lighter weight than FTP? Or did the above
sys admin probably have a very atypical setup, or a misconfigured
server?
Dan
