On Wed, May 05, 2010 at 03:09:20PM -0700, Mark Crispin wrote:
> On Wed, 5 May 2010, UCTC Sysadmin wrote:
> >If they can understand the difference between TCP and UDP, they can
> >understand state.
>
> I wouldn't be so certain. If you look at a lot of applications these
> days, they blat out a query, and read an answer. If they don't get an
> answer in what they consider to be a suitable time, they drop the
> connection and try again.
>
> Put another way, they treat TCP just like UDP, only with this strange and
> annoying "connection" stuff that they don't understand why it's there.
>
you may rail about the stupidity of those developers as much as you
want. apparently unlike you, they live in the real world where the only
guarantee which tcp provides is that the data stream is intact - *if* it
arrives. timeouts as a workaround for shortcomings of the tcp/ip stack
under real-world conditions are a perfectly reasonable approach, just
like keep-alive signals in higher-level stateful protocols to prevent
timeouts. if you want to do better, you can use imap directly over ATM
or ISDN or other really stateful protocols. but even these sometimes
just go deaf, because they run with crappy real-world system software,
too.
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