Re: [hybi] frame length encoding

[John Tamplin <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 4:27 PM, Pieter Hintjens <[e-mail]> wrote:

> CPU core count increases but I think it's fair to say CPU speeds have
> hit the top of the curve.  Thus we're constrained by the capacity of
> one core to process the data off a network, while network capacity
> continues to double every 18-24 months.


I'm not sure I would agree with you on the network bandwidth.  Many places I
know of still use 100baseT to the desktop, 17 years after its introduction
and are only slowly migrating to GigE (itself 11 years old) as
infrastructure costs have come down to about equal.  I don't know of anyone
running higher than GigE to the desktop.  Beyond that, anecdotally the
typical size of the Internet connection at businesses doesn't seem to have
increased since I was in the ISP business 10 years ago (home and mobile
definitely has, though I still don't think at your suggested rate of
doubling).

I will grant your doubling pattern in Infiniband and Myrinet offerings, but
I doubt any significant portion of WebSocket traffic will be running on such
networks.


> Indeed, there are probably very few people in the open source world
> concerned with efficiency at the level we are.  I've explained our
> experience, and will leave it at that.
>

It may also be that WebSocket, which is primarily designed to give TCP-like
capabilities to web browsers, is not appropriate for your backend network --
perhaps a frontend would speak WebSocket to end-users, and then a protocol
more optimized for your needs going back to your servers.

Anyway, I agree with you that getting agreement on the framing, as long as
it is reasonable, is more important than what it actually is so we can get
on to the next problem.

-- 
John A. Tamplin
Software Engineer (GWT), Google