From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2010 16:16:25 +1100 From: Sam Watkins To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Message-ID: <20101115051625.GD27578@opal.ai.ki> References: <20101115032531.GB27578@opal.ai.ki> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.18 (2008-05-17) Subject: Re: [9fans] 9p vs http Topicbox-Message-UUID: 7e8a93fc-ead6-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 11:20:00PM -0500, John Floren wrote: > Please see lsub's Op and my Streaming talk at the most recent IWP9. Ok, thanks. I did not know that 9p has latency problems even when reading a single file. I was talking about pipelining, where you can ask the server to send a dozen files or chunks all of metadata all in a single packet. As I said, I think this might be useful even within a site. Do you think http has any disadvantages compared to 9p? Could it be used instead of 9p in a similar role? Example of http pipelining: client sends: HEAD / HTTP/1.1 Host: iwp9.org HEAD /slides/floren.pdf HTTP/1.1 Host: iwp9.org server replies: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Plan9 Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2010 05:06:10 GMT ETag: "2e3c1v24" Content-Length: 10382 Last-Modified: Fri, 15 Oct 2010 14:14:24 GMT Content-Type: text/html HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Plan9 Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2010 05:06:10 GMT ETag: "2e390v10" Content-Length: 122477 Last-Modified: Wed, 13 Oct 2010 23:55:44 GMT Content-Type: application/pdf > Also, regarding 'cat', the behavior of many basic tools is that, > barring any file arguments, they take stdin as input and output to > stdout, so cat's behavior makes sense to me. Yes, I suggest the other tools are wrong too! The '0 is special' behaviour may be convenient for interactive use, but it's a disaster for shell scripting. I already argued about this here at length and AFAIK did not convince anyone, so there's not much point trying it again. Sam