Re: Connection Header

I've been looking at how much work it would take do add a simple session
based connection-reuse method to existing implementations of HTTP 1.0, 
and it seems pretty simple.

libwww can be upgraded by putting a connection cache in HTTP.c, replacing
the HTConnect with a look at the cache, and a possible session probe, and 
by by using function variables for the NETREAD and NETWRITE calls. MGET could
be emulated by adding a varargs version of the LoadDocument call. 

NCSA httpd could be upgraded by a making a few hacks to process request, and 
by running it a couple of times under purify or test-center to get rid of 
any memory leaks. 

SCP is a good a way as any to do the packetisation; SCP does allow the responses
to be interleaved; however taking advantage of this requires enough rewriting to
make this sort of functionality worth leaving to HTTP-ng 

I think there's definitely a place for a quick hack HTTP 1.1 designed to 
be as small a change as possible to HTTP 1.0- re-using connections is the
biggest network performance  win- interleaved rendering gets most of the rest-
after that most of the gains are in functionality like challenge based payment,
security, better meta-information, and better proxy support.

Simon

Received on Monday, 19 December 1994 16:03:41 UTC