Efficiency of FTP URLs

Robert Lentz (lentz@rossi.astro.nwu.edu)
Mon, 25 Jul 1994 18:29:39 +0200

Greetings,
We have been having a small, local discussion on the efficiency of
FTP vs. HTTP. One of the items I pointed out was that for serving up an HTML
document with inlined images, FTP is very inefficient because of the startup
costs for every inlined images. Later I got to thinking that this would be
an obvious place for an optimization: leave the FTP open until done parsing
the HTML document in case any inlined images (or whatever) might be needed.
This morning I confirmed that MacWeb 1.0a2, MacMosaic 2.0a2, XMosaic
2.4, and WinMosaic 2.0a2 take the inefficient approach of a separate ftp
connection for each inlined image. It would seem that optimizing this would
help the load on ftp servers, and response time to the user.

-Robert Lentz

-- 
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"You have to push as hard as the age that pushes against you."
-Flannery O'Connor