Re: HTTP-NG: status report

Jon P. Knight (J.P.Knight@lut.ac.uk)
Tue, 22 Nov 1994 19:30:42 +0100

On Tue, 22 Nov 1994, Gary Adams - Sun Microsystems Labs BOS wrote:
> If we intend for the server to parse documents and take action before the
> client has determined what they will do with the information, there will need
> to be some additional dialog upfront where the client can communicate its
> "intentions" about the information it has requested. e.g. I'd rather have
> 10,000 clients parse the document and determine what actions to take than
> to have the server parse the same document 10,000 times while the next 10,000
> requests are waiting.

This is a good point and something which I think should be bourne in mind
when designing any client-server system. Due to the rapid growth of cheap
processing power we can often assume that the client machine will have
plentiful processing power but that the servers are likely to easily
become overloaded. This is especially true if the server is handling a
popular service and is getting a very large number of transactions from
widely dispersed clients, each of which has slightly different
requirements (due to different local images caches, hardware platforms, etc).

> Best of all I'd rather have the document author wait
> while their document is checked for errors and optimized for rapid retrieval
> just once so all 10,000 of us could enjoy the benefits.

Hopefully this sort of thing will become commonplace with the increased
use of validated HTML generators and browsers that flag HTML errors (after
all many of us use our browsers to check documents already - something
like Arena's ``Bad HTML'' is an excellent idea that all browser authors
should consider adopting IMHO).

Jon

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon Knight, Research Student in High Performance Networking and Distributed
Systems in the Department of _Computer_Studies_ at Loughborough University.
* It's not how big your share is, its how much you share that's important *