At Fri, 05 Oct 2007 12:18:20 +0100,
Alexey Melnikov wrote:
Hi Eric,
Thank you for your comments.
(Today is about the worst time for me to reply to your comments, as I am
going on holidays tomorrow.)
Eric Rescorla wrote:
$Id: draft-ietf-lemonade-reconnect-client-06-rev.txt,v 1.1 2007/10/04
22:25:53 ekr Exp $
OVERALL
This document describes an extension to IMAP to provide faster
synchronization between client and server. As far as I can
tell, the optimizations are:
- Removing one round trip needed to discover which messages
have been expunged.
Yes, if compared to the case when the client/server also implement the
CONDSTORE extension (RFC 4551).
(Actually it removed 2 round trips per mailbox synchronization.)
When compared to RFC 3501, this extension can potentially provides huge
bandwidth saving. If a client wants to synchronize flag changes in a
mailbox, the client needs to fetch flags for *all* mailboxes. For a
30,000 message mailbox that I currently have is quite painful over a
slow link.
I don't think it makes sense to compare this to 3501 without 4551,
since 4551 is already an RFC. The question is whether this document
should be advanced. What's the optimization compared
to 4551? Also, you say it's "quite painful" now. How much less
painful is it with this document. How about if compression is
used. This seems like something
where measurements would be nice.
DETAILED COMMENTS
S 2.
This would be improved by some overall diagram of the new and
old behavior and some measurement, even an ad hoc one, of
the performance improvement.
Ok. An older version of this document had some numbers, but people
complained about "irrelevant text".
Maybe I'm missing something, but those comparisons are to 3501,
not CONDSTORE, right?
S 3.3, 3.4, 3.5.
These would all benefit from a statement of how they differ from
3501, rather than just stating new rules.
(Actually, 3.5 updates UID EXPUNGE which was defined in RFC 4315.)
Right. I believe some people wanted to see sections replacing the old
definitions, as opposed to just pointing out the difference from RFC 3501.
As a wordsmithing issue, I would recommend adding a single clarificatory
master section with these replacement definitions as subsections.
S 3.6.
The VANISHED response has two forms. The first form contains the
EARLIER tag, which signifies that the response was caused by a UID
FETCH (VANISHED) or a SELECT/EXAMINE (QRESYNC) command. This
response is sent if the UID set parameter to the UID FETCH (VANISHED)
command includes UIDs of messages that are no longer in the mailbox.
When the client sees a VANISHED EARLIER response it MUST NOT
decrement message sequence numbers for each successive message in the
mailbox.
The second form doesn't contain the EARLIER tag and is described
below. Once a client has used "(VANISHED)" with a UID FETCH or
"(QRESYNC)" with SELECT/EXAMINE command, the server SHOULD use the
VANISHED response without the EARLIER tag instead of the EXPUNGE
response. The server SHOULD continue using VANISHED in lieu of
EXPUNGE for the duration of the connection. In particular this
affects the EXPUNGE [RFC3501] and UID EXPUNGE [UIDPLUS] commands, as
well as messages expunged in other connections. Such VANISHED
response MUST NOT contain the EARLIER tag.
This is pretty unclear to the non-IMAP expert. Could you explain
in english what this is trying to accomplish in the document,
not just specify the protocol mechanics.
Basically the VANISHED response is used for 2 purposes: to report UIDs
of messages expunged earlier and to report UIDs of messages expunged now.
The difference between the two is that in the former case the client
doesn't need to decrement the number of messages in the mailbox, while
in the latter case it must.
The former can be distinguished from the latter by presence of the
"(EARLIER)" label.
OK. That could be clearer in the main text.
S 4.1.
Strictly speaking, a server implementation that doesn't remember
modsequences associated with expunged messages can be considered
compliant with this specification. Such implementations return all
expunged messages specified in the UID set of the UID FETCH
(VANISHED) command every time, without paying attention to the
specified CHANGEDSINCE modsequence. Such implementations are
discouraged, as they can end up returning VANISHED responses bigger
than the result of a UID SEARCH command for the same UID set.
Isn't this inconsistent with:
If the server is capable of storing modification sequences for the
selected mailbox, it MUST increment the per-mailbox mod-sequence if
at least one message was permanently removed due to the execution of
the EXPUNGE command. For each permanently removed message the server
MUST remember the incremented mod-sequence and corresponding UID. If
at least one message got expunged, the server MUST send the updated
per-mailbox modification sequence using the HIGHESTMODSEQ response
code (defined in [CONDSTORE]) in the tagged OK response.
If not, why not?
No, there is no inconsistency:
"a server implementation that doesn't remember modsequences" == "a
server is incapable of storing modsequences".
The second paragraph you quoted is conditional on server's ability to
store modsequences. This behaviour is optional for servers.
OK. I misread this. Thanks.
S 5.
The client MUST also take note of any MODSEQ FETCH data items
received from the server. Whenever the client receives a tagged
response to a command, it calculates the highest value among all
MODSEQ FETCH data items received since the last tagged response. If
this value is bigger than the client's copy of the HIGHESTMODSEQ
value, then the client MUST use this value as its new HIGHESTMODSEQ
value.
So, I probably misunderstand something, but my read of 4551 made
it seem like you could do a MODSEQ FETCH that would not return
all the metadata for every message.
Yes, if the client issues a FETCH MODSEQ for a subset of messages.
However the previous paragraph in the same section requires the client
to perform a full synchronization.
OK.
In that case, wouldn't this
procedure risk you having a modseq that is higher than some
messages you haven't examined yet? What am I missing.
The intent of this paragraph is to talk about unsolicited FETCH MODSEQ
returned by the server *after* a full synchronization is complete (the
previous paragraph in the same section). So the situation you describe
can't happen, because the server is required to send all unsolicited
FETCH MODSEQ responses.
The beginning of this paragraph is ambiguous, so I suggest that it
should be clarified by changing the first quoted sentence to read:
After completing full synchronization, the client MUST also take note of
any MODSEQ FETCH data items received from the server.
WFM.
-Ekr
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf