Re: Holding connections open & incremental searching

[Peter Deutsch <[e-mail]>]

[ Somebody wrote: ]

> >    WNILS Minutes - March 29, 1993
> >     9.   Ability to Hold Connections Open
> >          Multiple queries would benefit from the ability to
> >          leave a connection open.  This should be included
> >          as an option.
> 
> I recently saw a demonstration of cc:Mail, and feel that its
> incremental address lookup feature is the wave of the future;
> people are going to start demanding this sort of responsiveness
> and ease of use from all e-mail packages soon.
.  .  .
> IMHO, if holding connections open (e.g. with a -hold keyword) saves even
> a half a second per query, it could well make the difference between
> incremental searches being acceptably fast or annoyingly slow.
> What do you think?

I agree that this is a useful option. I also doubt that it
could or should be supported in generally accessible
public access servers (it has an obvious role in dedicated
mail directory servers). The problem is, keeping telnet
sessions open like this consumes resources on the server
host and thus will pose a problem once you have too many
people trying to do it at once.

I'm for it, and agree that in certain circumstances it
will buy us something. 

Synta for this is easy. A gobal constraint "HOLD". If
present, connect is not dropped.



			- peterd


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Peter Deutsch,                                       [e-mail]
President,                                        [phone]  (phone)
Bunyip Information Systems Inc.                    [phone]  (fax)

  "any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology"
           (- with apologies to Arthur C. Clarke, who almost got it right...)
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