[darcs-users] soc progress 3

Dan Pascu dan at ag-projects.com
Thu Jun 11 08:44:50 UTC 2009


On 11 Jun 2009, at 11:19, Petr Rockai wrote:

> Nathan Gray <kolibrie at graystudios.org> writes:
>> On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 09:55:32AM +0200, Petr Rockai wrote:
>>> Moreover, I should start looking into getting us a new pristine  
>>> format that I
>>> have promised in my application (the indexed working directory is,  
>>> obviously,
>>> just a part of the whole deal).
>>
>> If I remember correctly, this has to do with setting up a  
>> subdirectory
>> structure for the files in the pristine cache, so the files are not
>> all in a single directory.
> Partially. It is also about packing up the many small files into  
> bigger chunks,
> so http transfers are more efficient (ie. fewer roundtrips and less  
> overhead).

Wouldn't a persistent http connection serve better this purpose?  
Starting with version 1.1 the http protocol supports keep-alive, which  
means you only have to make 1 connection and can fetch all the files  
over it. I believe that making a lot of one shot connections that only  
fetch one file is much more taxing than the fact that there are many  
files to transfer. I think that making less connections can result in  
a better improvement than reducing the number of files to fetch,  
unless that number becomes 1. This is more apparent in the case of  
https where the initial connection setup is very expensive.

In the end both techniques could be applied, it's just my belief that  
using keep-alive can provide a larger improvement, with less effort.  
Later we could see if grouping small files together provides any  
significant improvement over that or it's just marginal, in which case  
the extra complexity is probably not worth it.

--
Dan





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