Re: two-way communication in html

James Gwertzman (gwertzma@das.harvard.edu)
Sun, 5 Mar 1995 12:45:45 +0500

I'm worried that in the discussions on interactive HTTP people haven't
been sufficiently concerned with bandwidth or server load. I'm
currently researching wide-area WWW caching schemes (more than just
campus proxies or client caches) so I'm very attuned to issues that
might affect this. Querying the server every n seconds is not only
very inefficient, but even a mildly popular site would quickly become
overloaded. Likewise, in the rush to add dynamic pages to the WWW I
think we should not forget that caching information is one of the ways
we're going to make sure that WWW growth does not overtake Internat
capacity. Anytime you can handle interactivity by transferring a
script to the client and having the script run on the browser is going
to be a much better solution than always running the script on the
server, and forcing the client to act as nothing more than a fancy
dumb terminal. That way the script could be cached around the net, and
the original server's load will not depend on how interactive the
particular application is.