Re: [9fans] 9p vs http

[John Floren <slawmaster@gmail.com>]

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
>
>
>