RE: new version of requirements following ARTF telcon of 2003-01-15

John, well put. I hope the AFTF agrees. --Jeff

-----Original Message-----
From: John J. Barton [mailto:John_Barton@hpl.hp.com]
 
At 11:41 AM 1/29/2003 +0600, Sanjiva Weerawarana wrote:
<snip>

> > DR19. The specification must enable efficient allocation of buffers by
> > receivers.
>
>I'm again confused; while a statement like "this spec must be
>implementable as efficiently as possible" is reasonable (and
>motherhood-and-apple-pie IMO), speaking specifically about
>buffer allocation seems rather pointed.

Sanjiva, the key words here are "by receivers".  The serialization
mechanism can have serious impacts on resource constrained or
heavily loaded receivers.  Emitting a SOAP message in an
HTTP-style MIME-like format without content-length headers leaves
the receiver with no  recourse but multiple buffering layers and repeated
dynamic memory allocations as more content arrives.  For resource
constrained receivers, the result is late and annoying buffer overflow;
for heavily loaded receivers, the result is poor performance.

This is, unfortunately not apple-pie since typically a receiver-friendly
protocol requires resources to be spent on the sender, eg to count
the bytes as the package is assembled.  The specification will
shift real costs.

Hope this helps clarify this issue.

Received on Friday, 31 January 2003 12:24:20 UTC