Caching and sizes, the explosion of responise codes (was Re: Caching and status codes)

[Luke Emmet]

On 08-Nov-2020 22:22, Sean Conner wrote:
>
>   The concern is over large responses.  It wasn't much of a concern until
> gemini://konpeito.media/ was created and serving up large audio files (and
> archives of said audio files).  I can envision a client being configured to
> abort the download if say, a 10 megabyte file is being downloaded.  It
> *sucked* when my DSL went down in late September/early October (yes, about
> three weeks) and I had to rely upon my cellphone hot spot.  I didn't have a
> large data plan for the cell phone becuase I didn't need it, until I did.
> It would have been nice to configure my web browser to not download anything
> over 5M at that point.

(At the risk of wading into this thread - I should know better)

Yes that is a sensible client design IMO, since you cannot know how long 
to wait. In my client GemiNaut (Windows only atm sorry folks), there are 
two options:

  - abandon download after X Mb or after Y seconds

The gemget client/utility also implements this approach, which is what 
GemiNaut uses under the hood.

The values are tunable according to the desires of the user. Mostly I 
have mine set to 5mb or 10 seconds. If something times out beyond that I 
make a judgement whether I really want to up the threshold temporarily 
to let it through. Or maybe go look elsewhere ;)

By and large tex/gemini content is very small and fast which is one of 
its great selling points. Other binary files are more "meh".

  - Luke