From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <20101115032531.GB27578@opal.ai.ki> References: <20101115032531.GB27578@opal.ai.ki> Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2010 23:20:00 -0500 Message-ID: From: John Floren To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Subject: Re: [9fans] 9p vs http Topicbox-Message-UUID: 7e6a05c4-ead6-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 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 wrote: > hi, > > I am wondering what you think about the capabilities of 9p compared to > http/1.1. =C2=A0Perhaps this seems like an odd comparison, but I think 9p= and http > are broadly similar in purpose and functionality. =C2=A0While writing a s= imple > webserver, I got to thinking that http is really a very capable protocol. > > http is text-based, it supports pipelining and arbitraty metadata. =C2=A0= As far as I > know, 9p does not support pipelining nor arbitraty metadata. =C2=A0It see= ms to me > that these are big advantages for http. =C2=A09p supports walking; are th= ere other > things 9p can do which http cannot, which give 9p a significant advantage= ? > > Am I correct, that 9p does not support pipelining? =C2=A0I suppose this w= ould be a > big problem. =C2=A0For example, with http pipelining one may ask a server= to HEAD > (like stat) 10,000 files together, without having to wait for the respons= es. > 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 d= isks - > if the filesystem receives 100 open/read/stat requests bundled together, = it > might optimise disk access to minimise seeking, as is commonly done for w= rites. > > By the way, I read the other day on this list that there is no need to im= prove > cat(1). =C2=A0Well for me, I still feel that the command `cat` without ar= gs should > concatenate 0 files (producing no output), not copy stdin to stdout! > > > Sam > > >