- From: Henrik Frystyk Nielsen <frystyk@microsoft.com>
- Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1999 22:11:35 -0800
- To: "Steven D. Gray" <steven_gray@rocketmail.com>, <www-lib@w3.org>
> My question to the gurus is why? What is this 2000 ms delay used for?
> Is it critical? Naturally, to solve my problem, I experimented with
> values as low as 20. My program now executes very quickly, as desired.
> But will there be side-effects as a result of my tinkering?
>
> I would appreciate hearing from anyone with some insight into the above
> "magic" constants.
The delay is there because of weird interactions between HTTP and TCP that
may cause the client to loose the resonse in case of for example a 401
(Access Denied) response. The fact that it is 2 secs is more or less
random although this is what was necessary in order to support cross
Atlantic POST and PUTs of large document. The reason for the delay is
described a bit in
http://www.w3.org/Library/src/HTTP.html
along with a API for how to set it. There are other timers in libwww, they
are described at
http://www.w3.org/Library/src/HTTimer.html
Henrik
Received on Wednesday, 8 December 1999 01:12:17 UTC