I have a question about how Serf works that I keep forgetting to send to this list.
When you do an update with Serf, my understanding is that it does a REPORT request that gives it back a list of files that it needs to update and then it fires off a bunch of GET requests to retrieve those files. With Neon, the changes are all included in the REPORT response. My question is how this intersects with Deltas. Suppose I have a large text file in my working copy and someone has made a small minor change to the file. When using Neon, I know that the client and server just exchange a relatively small delta that is applied to my working copy. I imagine this delta is part of the REPORT response that the client receives. What happens with Serf? From what I know, I would assume that Serf has to do a GET of the entire file. Is this true or does it somehow only request a delta? And what might this mean for real world performance. Kind of a side question. One of the benefits of the Serf design is that theoretically enables the usage of caching proxies between the client and server. This is another reason I assume that Serf must request the entire file. I do not see how a caching proxy would provide much benefit if the Serf requests were for somewhat arbitrary deltas between two revisions. -- Thanks Mark Phippard http://markphip.blogspot.com/
