Re: Smart fetch via HTTP?

From: Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff@gmail.com>
Date: May 16, 2007, 21:26 UTC
Message-ID: <46a038f90705161426n3b928086t2d3e68749557f866@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0705161232120.6410@racer.site>

On 5/16/07, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> On Wed, 16 May 2007, Martin Langhoff wrote:
> > Do the indexes have enough info to use them with http ranges? It'd be
> > chunkier than a smart protocol, but it'd still work with dumb servers.
> It would not be really performant, would it? Besides, not all Web servers
> speak HTTP/1.1...

Performant compared to downloading a huge packfile to get 10% of it? Sure! It'd probably take a few trips, and you'd end up fetching 20% of the file, still better than 100%.

> Besides, not all Web servers speak HTTP/1.1...

Are there any interesting webservers out there that don't? Hand-rolled purpose-built webservers often don't but those don't serve files, they serve web apps. When it comes to serving files, any webserver that is supported (security-wise) these days is HTTP/1.1.

And for services like SF.net it'd be a safe low-cpu way of serving git files. 'cause the git protocol is quite expensive server-side (io+cpu) as we've seen with kernel.org. Being really smart with a cgi is probably going to be expensive too.

cheers,