4 ms·
Yeah, but in practice ranged GETs and HTTP servers are more likely to be down than the FTP servers.
by jerven 10y ago
Yeah, but in practice ranged GETs and HTTP servers are more likely to be down than the FTP servers.
- dekhn 10y agoThis is just false. What evidence do you have? HTTP was architected for availability (load balancing across many servers). Also, FTP has two TCP connections per copy, doubling the chance of abrubt termination. I've moved petabytes over the internet using FTP and HTTP. HTTP wins hands-down.
- jerven 10y agoPractical experience in such an institute providing such data. FTP servers for files just run, http servers tend to do more things than just serving files. This could be separated out of course but in _practice_ they aren't. Setting up the http server right and not touching them is the hard part, not the actual http protocol part. i.e. I do accept that http is a much better protocol than FTP but that social and organisational reasons lead to FTP being more stable and dependable in the field for large file download than http servers.
- dekhn 10y agoso your arugment is "http is more flexible so people misconfigure their servers and that affects availability". that's a server config issue, nothing to do with either of the systems. If you're setting up a CDN (which is what these genomic servers are) you just configure the servers to serve files, nothing else. My hundreds of aborted recursive FTP fetchs compared to my almost-never aborted recursive HTTP show that anything you're seeing about FTP being more stable is just a PEBKAC issue.
- infinite8s 10y agoYou and the parent aren't really disagreeing.