Re: [9fans] 9p vs http

[Bruce Ellis <bruce.ellis@gmail.com>]

i'm with john

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 3:20 PM, John Floren <slawmaster@gmail.com> wrote:
> Please see lsub's Op and my Streaming talk at the most recent IWP9.
>
> 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.
>
> On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 10:25 PM, Sam Watkins <sam@nipl.net> wrote:
>> hi,
>>
>> I am wondering what you think about the capabilities of 9p compared to
>> http/1.1.  Perhaps this seems like an odd comparison, but I think 9p and http
>> are broadly similar in purpose and functionality.  While writing a simple
>> webserver, I got to thinking that http is really a very capable protocol.
>>
>> http is text-based, it supports pipelining and arbitraty metadata.  As far as I
>> know, 9p does not support pipelining nor arbitraty metadata.  It seems to me
>> that these are big advantages for http.  9p supports walking; are there other
>> things 9p can do which http cannot, which give 9p a significant advantage?
>>
>> Am I correct, that 9p does not support pipelining?  I suppose this would be a
>> big problem.  For example, with http pipelining one may ask a server to HEAD
>> (like stat) 10,000 files together, without having to wait for the responses.
>> Over a high latency link (e.g. Australia -> USA), this might save perhaps an
>> hour of waiting.
>>
>> Such an asyncronous interface might be useful even when accessing local disks -
>> if the filesystem receives 100 open/read/stat requests bundled together, it
>> might optimise disk access to minimise seeking, as is commonly done for writes.
>>
>> By the way, I read the other day on this list that there is no need to improve
>> cat(1).  Well for me, I still feel that the command `cat` without args should
>> concatenate 0 files (producing no output), not copy stdin to stdout!
>>
>>
>> Sam
>>
>>
>>
>
>