Re: delta encoding and state management

["Poul-Henning Kamp" <[e-mail]>]

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In message <[e-mail]>
, Patrick McManus writes:

>> As I said, I think that if the state itself is never larger than a request
>> and substitutes for the request, it's not that big of a deal.
>
>honestly, the trend in ram prices [...]

I think both of your perspectives are too near-sighted here.

The protocol you should be working on should be the one which
still works when most middle-class homes, not only in the western
world, but also in India and China, have fibre to the home at
speeds of 1Gbit/sec and above.

In that world, a major piece of global news, be it a naked breast,
an geophysical event or a shot politician, is going to make the
traffic spikes we have seen until now look tame.

HTTP is a very assymetric usage protocol, and therefore any amount
of state that the server _has to_ retain for a client must justify
it's existence, byte for byte, against the scenario where 10% of
the world want to access the same URL.

HTTP/1 allows you to deliver content without committing any per-client
state, beyond the TCP socket, and that is not a "degraded mode",
that is the default mode.

If your HTTP/2 proposal cannot do that, you're working on the wrong
protocol.

Poul-Henning

-- 
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