the original title has (by default) added to it, and the article points out it remains available as a config flag. so the real discussion should be if it's the

the original title has (by default) added to it, and the article points out it remains available as a config flag. so the real discussion should be if it's the clients or the servers obligation to reorder binary integers as needed, or if the standard requests both to be in network byte order. technically do you use hton(3)/ntoh(3) [1] on every call in server and client, or do you apply it conditionally, on just the "smarter" side, and only if server and client native byte order mismatch? if you have the intelligence in the server you're hitting speculative execution all over the server, "penalizing" every user of the server, if ever so slightly, and "hardener" so if you have a mixed bag of clients, so speculative execution fails regularly. so you move the burden to conditionally swap bytes to the clients, all of them. chances are the clients will talk to just one server. the price you pay is clients without byte swap option simply can't connect. I _did_ run (virtual) X Servers on zSeries to run graphical software locally, on The Host (remote access via vnc), and all of this _does_make sense. [1] https://linux.die.net/man/3/htons https://linux.die.net/man/3/htons