On Tue, 12 Dec 2006, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
quoted text
> On Tue, 12 Dec 2006, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 12 Dec 2006, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> > 
> > > But it would become a non-problem when the HTTP transport would learn 
> > > to read and interpret the .idx files, basically constructing thin 
> > > packs from parts of the .pack files ("Content-Range:" comes to 
> > > mind)...
> > 
> > Woooh.
> 
> Does that mean "Yes, I'll do it"? ;-)

Umm. I hope it means "Woooh, that's crazy talk".

You do realize that then you need to teach the http-walker about walking 
the delta chain all the way up? For big pulls, you're going to be a lot 
_slower_ than just downloading the whole dang thing, because the delta 
objects are often just ~40 bytes, and you've now added a ping-pong latency 
for each such small transfer.

You don't need to download many such small ranges, and suddenly the few 
hundred ping-pongs that got you a few tens of kB of data took longer than 
just downloading a big stream efficiently that got you everything.

One big reason the native git protocol is efficient is that it's largely a 
streaming protocol (apart from the early ref-walking, but even that tries 
to stream as much as possible, rather than having a back-and-forth latency 
for each query)

		Linus
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html