Hi Tom, nice to meet you Adam,
TH> Some people are wondering why polipo should go in Debian, given the number
TH> of HTTP proxies already there. Any answers to these questions?
I'll do my best.
AM> So essentially, it is like wwwoffle.
Internally, polipo is more like Squid. And it doesn't yet have many
of the wonderful features of wwwoffle.
AM> Anyway, over a slow connection, wwwoffle does not have a lot
AM> of overhead. Even if a new connection has to be established for every
AM> single item, the overhead would primarly be with the server AFAIK.
No. Opening a new connection costs one round-trip-time for the
SYN-SYNACK-ACK handshake. Over a dialup line, that's roughly 300ms.
If you're donwloading a page with a mere 4 embedded images, that's 1.5
seconds overhead.
AM> But then over dialup, you cannot DL that many things at the same
AM> time.
Because wwwoffle doesn't throttle outgoing connections, hence in
presence of multiple fetches over a dialup line the multiple
connections congest mutually. This is not the case with polipo.
AM> wwwoffle quite a lot. I found it to be very fast. Polipo might have some
AM> advantages over wwwoffle though, but I'm not sure they would make me
AM> switch from using wwwoffle....
Wwwoffle is a great piece of software, please stick to it if it meets
your needs. Unfortunately, it doesn't meet mine.
AM> Rewriting something for the sake of rewriting is just
AM> <fill in the blank>.
A lot of fun ?
Adam, please read the polipo manual, especially the sections about
pipelining and partial objects. Neither wwwoffle nor Squid have this
sort of support for HTTP/1.1.
Polipo is a new program, and as such does not enjoy the level of
stability of Squid or the features of wwwoffle. This does not mean
that polipo does not hold a lot of promise.
Juliusz
