Re: [hybi] max frame size, was: frame length encoding

[Pieter Hintjens <[e-mail]>]

On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 6:50 PM, Julian Reschke <[e-mail]> wrote:

> 32 bits has the advantage that it's big enough for almost all use case we
> can currently think of.

At least one person has cited a case where a 31-bit length caused a
failure.  It's also naive to design for today's use cases and ignore
the basic rule that data volumes and sizes double every 24 months.
640K is enough for anyone, right?

The only cases that really matter here are:

- very short frames, where every byte is significant
- very long frames, where any ceiling is significant

Medium length frames can be treated as long frames with zero
significant cost.  You could stick a 100-byte header on a 100K frame
and it would not be significant.

There is no point optimizing any case except the two: very short (trim
space), very long (trim complexity).

It's also naive to claim that WebSockets is only for JavaScript, only
for dumb browsers, only for medium size data.  We're designing "TCP
over HTTP" in a real sense and there are generations of applications
that will use this, way beyond today's use cases.  Please, think of
the children!

-
Pieter Hintjens
iMatix - www.imatix.com