Re: #282: Recommend minimum sizes for protocol elements

On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 01:10:16AM -0700, Brian Pane wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 12:26 AM, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> wrote:
> > Haven't heard much. If we s/20k/4k/ in the header section, any other comments / suggestions / concerns?
> 
> How about something like 4072 bytes instead of 4k?  That would give
> the implementor some space for a length field and/or memory-management
> bookkeeping inside the same page as the buffer, on systems with 4KB
> pages.

One specific value will never match all usages. For instance, I could
store those pages in trees which need more than 24 bytes on 64-bit
systems. The proposed value should be seen as a guideline to favor
interoperability and nothing more. If an implementation makes use of
4kB pages and need 64 bytes for page management, resulting in 4032
bytes, it will still be fine because the application which would
complain about the missing 64 bytes will once in a while be hit by
implementations respecting the 4096 bytes too.

So, while your point is completely valid as an optimisation principle,
we should not be that precise because it would become much more complex
to respect for many usages.

Regards,
Willy

Received on Friday, 24 June 2011 13:33:26 UTC