Re: Examples Are Somewhat Confusing

[Mike Weston <mweston@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

If the 2.5MB you are parsing is coming from a disk, and is alternately
interspersed between the 2.5MB that you are potentially skipping, the
reduced parsing time will be dwarfed by the time to read the data from
the disk.  If the data is coming over a network, the situation is
probably similar.  It seems like we're talking about single digit
percentage performance issues, at a non-trivial cost in terms of code
for some simple applications.

-- Mike Weston

Alec Dun (Exchange) wrote:
> 
> Hi Frank,
> 
> The vCard may be 500 bytes, but I may have 10,000 of them.  That's 5Mb
> of data I have to look thru (if I'm doing a linear search), and if, on
> average, I can stop searching 1/2 way thru a v-card because I found all
> the properties that I need to do the comparison, I can avoid parsing
> 2.5Mb of data.
> 
> What specifically is the down-side here that worries you?
> 
> Thanks,
> Alec.
> 
> >----------
> >From:  Frank Dawson[SMTP:fdawson@raleigh.ibm.com]
> >Sent:  Monday, August 26, 1996 2:11 PM
> >To:    Alec Dun (Exchange)
> >Cc:    'ietf-asid'; 'ietf-calendar'; 'Frank Dawson'
> >Subject:       RE: Examples Are Somewhat Confusing
> >
> >Alec:
> >
> >I appreciate your answering my questions. Thanks.
> >
> >The required sequencing of the content information beyond boundary sentinels
> >seem somewhat harsh. You have made a point that a search engine can be
> >optimized if it predictable that the vCard or other application/directory
> >content has such a sequencing order.
> >
> >It just seems an unnecessarily  restrictive a request. Saying the header must
> >appear before the body, and in the body, the body header must appear before
> >the
> >body content is an appropriate level of required ordering. But beyond that,
> >it
> >might be a bit restrictive.
> >
> >The size of these things are not really very large. For a vCard, we see less
> >than 500 bytes on average. That is really small. This ordering is not going
> >to
> >improve efficiency to the point of paying for the restriction on generating
> >these content portions.
> >
> >- - Frank Dawson