On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 3:28 PM, Bert Huijben <[email protected]> wrote: > The biggest benefit of gstein's approach would be that it works even > for very old servers. A very strong argument if serf would be the new > default. > > The only other valid option would be to implement the fetch-all, like > Ivan suggested. That would also perform well on current servers. > > We can't assume users have 1.8 servers the day 1.8 is released :( > And if we could, we could assume editor v2.
Right. This is why I suggested that we work on Depth:1 directory PROPFINDs instead of Mike's patch. It will be compatible with older servers, as Bert says (all the way back to 1.0). And as Justin said: the property data has to travel across the wire, so whether that is within a PROPFIND response body, or inside a giant REPORT... it doesn't really matter. The only *potential* concern is whether the HTTP request/response overhead is significant. Now... I don't know who thought a patch existed. I merely stated that I wanted to do it, and opened an issue about it (see issue tracker). It would reduce both CPU and traffic. Regarding synchronous vs async: the commit process *should* be pipelining its requests. The fact that it doesn't is just a coding shortcut. One day in the future, I'd like an FS backend that will allow multiple connections for commit, but that'll take a while. It will be possible with ra_serf when that happens. Another option would be for the FS to advertise whether it can take certain parallel operations: BDB can do this; FSFS cannot. The client could then improve its operation. There may be other opportunities for async operation (replay? merge stuff?). I've been busy cleaning up ra_serf to make it easier to add Ev2 support. Not really adjust its wire operation. Anyway... ra_serf enables us to do things that ra_neon never will. That is why I believe we should jettison ra_neon and just go with ra_serf. So far, beyond Philip's concern about traffic/CPU tradeoff, and a couple open issues... I think we're in good shape to pull the lever. If I've missed some concerns, then please let me know. Thanks, -g
