Re: Protocol Benchmarking

David Koblas (koblas@netcom.com)
Wed, 2 Feb 1994 00:20:47 -0800 (PST)


> Has anyone done any recent studies of the efficiency of the various
>common information sharing protocols (HTTP, Gopher, WAIS, etc)? I'd
>like to know how each compares to the others and also where the majority
>of the bandwidth is being consumed (transferring images, I assume).

Though it would be hard to "see" in a protocol study. HTTP has a one
probably that I would enjoy seeing fixed in the near future (it is my
personal beef with HTTP).

HTTP 1.0 example negotiating session:

Connection opened:
GET /index.html HTTP/1.0
[ batch of "Accept" and other headers sent,
mosaic sends about 1K worth ]

File is sent
Connection closed:
Connection opened (to the same host):
GET /logo.gif HTTP/1.0
[ batch of "Accept" and other headers sent,
mosaic sends about 1K worth ]

File is sent
Connection closed:

This is awful, since not only is there connection creation/tear down
expenses, but also retrasmission of "client information" to the server.
Also, since (from the survey of my server) most of the HTML documents
are ~1K in size, it means that twice the information is being sent
than necessary... Not good for a slow link..

This hopefully could get changed (HTTP 1.1?) into a protocol that
doesn't close the connection after one file is trasmitted, but rather
leaves it open for a "short" while. Where it is closed either through
a client "QUIT" or a server timeout.

--koblas@netcom.com