[Zope] WebDAV Speed Issues.

[Brian Lloyd]

> > What regulates Zope's WebDAV speed?  The server, CPU/RAM, or bandwith? I
> > would also be curious if WebDAV is generaly bandwith intensive.
> 
> FYI, WebDAV is an HTTP protocol, and its speed is dictated by exactly
> the same things as HTTP, viz. 'all the above'.  Any improvements to
> the speed you serve up pages will have a directly proportionate effect
> on the speed of WebDAV, and vice versa.

The DAV protocol is xml-based, so there is some overhead there
(as a bonus, the current DAV implementation uses the relatively
slow xmllib, since the faster parsers did not have the required 
namespace support at the time that code was written). Certainly 
there are some opportunities for speed improvement there. I've 
also noticed that MS Web Folders often seems to "freeze up" for 
a second or two at a time when uploading / downloading unless 
you move your mouse around in the dialog. 

I've always thought that this looked like some sort of message pump 
problem with the WebFolders implementation, but it would be worthwhile 
for someone to watch the dialogue between the client and server to 
see if maybe there is something deeper there (maybe its trying to do 
some sort of fancier HTTP 1.1 things that we don't support well?). At 
a minimum it would be good to know if people ever see the freezing 
behavior with other DAV servers (like mod_dav).

Brian Lloyd        brian@digicool.com
Software Engineer  540.371.6909              
Digital Creations  http://www.digicool.com