[tex-live] This morning's 2011 pretest (hyphenation, ftp issues)

[George N. White III]

On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 11:48 AM, Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at> wrote:

> On Di, 21 Jun 2011, Taco Hoekwater wrote:
>> Sure, that was easy enough. I just patched a Download.pm before
>> doing a fresh test install. There are still inexplicable FTP errors
>> after each 15 or so packages, but now the recovery from one of those
>> takes only 10 secs, so after a complete 'scheme-context', downloading
>> now ends with:
>>
>>   Installing [138/138, time/total: 08:03/08:03]: xetexconfig [13k]
>
> Thanks for testing.
>
> Does anyone see a problem with setting the timeout to 10secs?
>
>>   Installing [138/138, time/total: 02:00/02:00]: xetexconfig [13k]
>>
>> which is a whole lot faster still (I do not understand why, but
>> clearly http is better than ftp, have to remember that)
>
> Interestingly. In principle it should not be so much faster, at least
> as far as I understand. But then, ftp servers are 20 years old,
> http servers are permanently developed. Maybe that is the point.

These days, network performance is often more about economics
than technical issues.

Hardware that than can keep up with most networks with http or ftp,
has become relatively cheap (compared to benchmarks like the admins'
salaries), so all that really matters is protocol overhead.

There can be different routes, quality of service, etc. for different
protocols, but perhaps the IMPORTANT difference is that when
http is slow the bosses complain, while if ftp is slow maybe some
backroom squint complains.  Bosses complaints may be funded,
squints' complaints would have to go to bosses for funds, so
perhaps it should not be surprising that http wins over ftp these
days.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia