Re: open transport protocol for aysnc web services?

On Mon, Jul 09, 2001 at 03:58:13PM -0400, Mark Baker wrote:
> Mark Nottingham wrote:
> > It's not so much that as the decoupling of the request and response.
> > In other words, if they make a request, keep the persistent
> > connection open, and then send responses upon events, the 1->n
> > request/response relationship will confuse proxies.
> 
> Confuse them any more than any other use of persistent connections?

Hmm, what do you mean by 'other'?


> > Of course, this
> > won't be the case if they keep a 1-1 relationship (perhaps by doing
> > request...response,request...response,request...).
> 
> They support that mode as well, though as a special case of a
> notification replay feature.
> 
> There's pros and cons of both approaches, but at least they provide a
> choice.

That's very good.


> > However, using persistent connections in this manner isn't too
> > friendly to proxies; it consumes resources on them, and many will
> > close idle connections after a fairly short timeout. When this
> > happens, it becomes inefficient to use the HTTP, as you have to
> > continually re-establish the connection.
> 
> True, but I believe that's "just" another consideration when deciding
> which approach to use.  If neither is suitable for you, I suppose the
> next step would be to look at something other than HTTP.  That has its
> costs too.

True, as long as their customers go in with their eyes open.


Cheers,

-- 
Mark Nottingham, Research Scientist
Akamai Technologies (San Mateo, CA USA)

Received on Wednesday, 11 July 2001 00:17:40 UTC