Richard Kettlewell rjk@terraraq.org.uk wrote:
Furthermore, FTP has the additional overhead of setting up the control connection and loggin in, which could quite plausibly double the number of round trips required to fetch a single small file.
I'm not sure this part holds: nothing requires you to wait for an answer to the login before sending the commands, although it is "intended to be an alternating dialogue". If the login fails, you've just given the server some garbage, but hey, you're not a human who mistyped, you're a dumb downloader program who will now fail anyway. Therefore you can pipeline commands and compared with HTTP headers and possible download of robots.txt in each direction, it's positively minimalist.
In general, though, more people have HTTP servers running already, don't need the rich features of FTP and there's little to choose between them.
My Opinion Only.
MJR