Efficiency and statefulness in conflict (Re: HTTP router point-of-view concerns)

On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 11:53 AM, James M Snell <jasnell@gmail.com> wrote:
> Most of the feedback that I've seen around header compression can be
> summarized as:
>
> Sending less data on the wire... Good.
> Less latency... Good.
> More efficiency... Good.
Efficiency is actually a trade-off. CPU vs. wire bandwidth use efficiency.
This might be a good time to point out how CPU and RAM bandwidth have
not been growing as quickly as wire bandwidth: if that keeps up then
compression is a waste of resources. OTOH, if we can rely on massive
horizontal scaling in CPUs to cheaply take up the slack then that
might not be a problem, but that's still in the future.
IMO compression needs to be a) OPTIONAL, b) default to OFF. If for a
particular client/server (client/proxy, proxy/proxy, proxy/server)
pair it pays to compress, then let them.
> Less visibility in the protocol... Bad.
Meh. That's what tools are for.
> Complicated implementation... Bad.
Sure.
> Introducing statefulness in the protocol... Bad.
Statefulness is bad if the efficiency trade-off isn't worth it. To me
"more efficiency... good" and "statefulness... bad" are in conflict.
That conflict needs resolution.
> Where I come down on this is simple:
>
> Yes, we need a way of encoding headers more efficiently in HTTP/2
You can do this without stateful compression: just use a more
efficient encoding (one-time static compression, if you wish). We had
this discussion a while back.
Nico
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Received on Friday, 19 July 2013 17:05:12 UTC

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