Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!intercon!amanda@intercon.UUCP From: amanda@intercon.UUCP (Amanda Walker) Newsgroups: news.software.nntp Subject: Re: Streaming NNTP Message-ID: <08-Jun-89.110238@192.41.214.2> Date: 8 Jun 89 14:51:23 GMT References: <42723@oliveb.olivetti.com> Sender: news@intercon.UUCP Reply-To: amanda@intercon.UUCP (Amanda Walker) Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation Lines: 27 In article <42723@oliveb.olivetti.com>, root@olivey.olivetti.com (The Superuser) writes: > Does this "streaming" mode seem like a viable option for NNTP? Well, some of this could be accomplished within the NNTP protocol as it stands. For example, I don't see any problem with sending multiple "IHAVE"s (or whatever), and collecting the responses as they come back, sort of like a sliding-window communications protocol. This would help a lot over links with high RTT. It would require some mods on the client side, but the current servers should be able to handle it, since incoming data on the TCP connection will just be buffered until the server reads it. On a similar note, I've been debating experimenting with a variation on the "HEAD" command that takes a range of article numbers (or a list of message-ids) and sends back the article headers as one big response (with blank lines between headers). This wouldn't be much more of a load on the server than XHDR is now, and would be a lot nicer than doing bunches of HEAD requests. Comments? -- Amanda Walker -- "Some of the worst mistakes in history have resulted from trying to apply methods that work fine in one field to another where they don't." -James Hogan