Re: Efficiency of FTP URLs

cwilson@spry.com
Mon, 25 Jul 94 10:01:06 PDT

> We have been having a small, local discussion on the efficiency of
>FTP vs. HTTP. One of the items I pointed out was that for serving up an HTML
>document with inlined images, FTP is very inefficient because of the startup
>costs for every inlined images. Later I got to thinking that this would be
>an obvious place for an optimization: leave the FTP open until done parsing
>the HTML document in case any inlined images (or whatever) might be needed.
> This morning I confirmed that MacWeb 1.0a2, MacMosaic 2.0a2, XMosaic
>2.4, and WinMosaic 2.0a2 take the inefficient approach of a separate ftp
>connection for each inlined image. It would seem that optimizing this would
>help the load on ftp servers, and response time to the user.

FTP _is_ an inefficient protocol for serving HTML documents with inlined
images, period (in fact, I'd be personally inclined to say FTP is an
inefficient protocol, period. :^) However, NCSA Mosaic for Windows
and its progeny DO leave the connection open (permanently, as a matter of
fact, until the server times it out.) I thought this was true of 2a2, but
it certainly should be of later releases (unless this was changed since I
left.) AIR Mosaic leaves it open.

-Chris Wilson

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Chris Wilson Spry, Inc.
WWW Technology Lead 316 Occidental Avenue S. 2nd Floor
Email: cwilson@spry.com Seattle, WA 98104
Phone: (206) 447-0300 FAX: (206) 447-9008
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