Re: NetScape...)

Jon E. Mittelhauser (jonm@mcom.com)
Fri, 28 Oct 1994 06:00:23 +0100

At 09:26 PM 10/27/94 +0100, Karl Auerbach wrote:
>
> > Folks are complaining about NetScape opening multiple sockets at once.
> > >From a UI perspective, you can't be faulted with trying to display the
> > most material in the fastest possible time.
> >
> > The Miss Manners approach to network programming dictates, however, that
> > a single application not go about hogging resources (like sockets,
> > bandwidth, etc...) to accomplish this.
>
>I'm not disagreeing with your comments... my own feeling, however, is
>that in terms of the overhead imposed on servers, the number of
>simultaneous requests is a smaller issue than the effective use (and
>re-use) of transport connections.
>
>Commenting in response to the folks who say that a server reaches
>steady state whether the clients are single-connection or
>parallal-connection: I agree with the note that with faster user
>response, the user may read more pages over a given period of time.
>This will increase the steady state load by some amount. (My feeling
>is that it would be less than 25% for a population of serious
>browsers, and a higher percentage for a population of wild surfers)

I wasn't trying to imply anything different. It is, however, worth
noting that the Web as a whole is under exponential growth. A single
step-up of 25% is almost immaterial with respect to a load that is
doubling at the rate that we are seeing...

In general,
Servers are going to need to be better designed and the persistant
TCP bugs in kernels are going to need to be fixed. We have already
taken steps on the first part and are working with system providers
on the second. We've also taken steps towards a reducing a large part
of the bandwidth requirements by using persistant caching for the
future releases of our client (Netscape). This should enable servers
to handle *drastically* larger loads. I would hope that these factors
would reduce the accusations of "maliciousness" that other people
have suggested with regards to the client. It is obviously in our
best interests to allow as many people to be served through our clients
and servers. Any action which lowered this number would be crazy on
our part.

-Jon