Re: [9fans] 9p vs http

[Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com>]

You're way off about the merits of pipelining.

As far as parallel requests are concerned,
the 9P protocol beats HTTP hands down
(as does basically any other request
response protocol), because it has explicit
unique IDs on the requests and responses.
That allows a server to respond to two
requests in an order different than their
arrival order.  If you send an expensive
HTTP request followed by a cheap one,
the server can't tell you the cheap answer
until it has told you the expensive answer.

The word "pipelining" means "we forgot to
put request and response IDs into the protocol
so we kludged it in by requiring responses to
happen in the same order as requests."
If a protocol says it has pipelining, that's
always a bad sign.

Russ