[whatwg] Issues with Web Sockets API

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Jul 27, 2009, at 2:44 PM, Drew Wilson wrote:

>
>
> There's another option besides blocking, raising an exception, and  
> dropping data: unlimited buffering in user space. So I'm saying we  
> should not put any limits on the amount of user-space buffering  
> we're willing to do, any more than we put any limits on the amount  
> of other types of user-space memory allocation a page can perform.

I think even unlimited buffering needs to be combined with at least a  
hint to the WebSocket client to back off the send rate, because it's  
possible to send so much data that it exceeds the available address  
space, for example when uploading a very large file piece by piece, or  
when sending a live media stream that requires more bandwidth than the  
connection can deliver. In the first case, it is possible, though  
highly undesirable, to spool the data to be sent to disk; in the  
latter case, doing that would just inevitably fill the disk. Obviously  
we need more web platform capabilities to make such use cases a  
reality, but they are foreseeable and we should deal with them in some  
reasonable way.

Regards,
Maciej