13 Mar
2007
13 Mar
'07
9:41 a.m.
On Tue, 13 Mar 2007, Jim Leonard wrote:
Jules Richardson wrote:
I vote we dispense with both, set up an FTAM responder, build an OSI
network, and bury this pesky Internet.
Andrew
The only irritating thing I've noticed is
that FTP seems consistently
slower than HTTP for transfers. I'm not sure if that's down to the
protocol, deliberate throttling by server admins, or simply that HTTP
servers tend to have more hardware thrown at them than FTP.
FTP adds an additional layer of checking (that TCP/IP already provides, so
I've never understood why its there), so that might be one reason. But a
better reason is that HTTP in today's world is used for streaming, and is
also simpler to firewall. FTP, especially active mode, requires state tables
and a tiny bit of thinking to handle properly across most firewalls, so a
loaded FTP server behind a firewall will be slower than a loaded HTTP server
behind a firewall.
I'm very surprised by all the anti-FTP discussion, including security. If
it's an anonymous /pub archive of stuff to distribute, there is no better
solution than FTP. Bittorrent is only useful for files for which there are
multiple requesters at the same time (like weekly snapshots of large kernel
source trees or something). Bittorrent gains you *nothing* for onesy-twosey
requests; in fact, it's much more of a PITA to set up.