[D3M0L1T10N]

I would love to hear your opinion about downloading via FTP's, I think it's the best, you mostly get good downloadspeeds, and there's no bother uppin' cause FXP-ing is much faster

 

[Pseudocyber]

I would love to hear your opinion about downloading via FTP's, I think it's the best, you mostly get good downloadspeeds, and there's no bother uppin' cause FXP-ing is much faster

I could respond more intelligently if I understood the last part of your comment - "no bother uppin'cause FXP-ing is much faster". Are you saying FXP-ign is file transferring? What is uppin'?

FTP is designed to be fast. It stands for File Transfer Protocol. It is a much more efficient way of moving files around than using HTTP which is NOT designed to transfer large files. However, many organizations might not run an FTP server so they resort to HTTP or they might not want to open their firewall to FTP and rely on HTTP instead.

Even faster than FTP is TFTP - trivial file transfer protocol. It uses a different transport mechanism - UDP instead of TCP.

 

[johnwill]

while TFTP may be slightly faster, it also has no recovery capability, so it's much more limiting. If it encounters a network error, it just quits, not what you generally want. TFTP is normally used to bootstrap an environment when you want a minimal capability, not for general file transfers.

In truth, the real difference between HTTP & FTP transfers won't make much difference to most people, unless you're doing a lot of large file transfers.

 

[Pseudocyber]

while TFTP may be slightly faster, it also has no recovery capability...

Right. Because it's UDP.

TFTP is normally used to bootstrap an environment when you want a minimal capability, not for general file transfers.

Right again. I mostly use it to transfer files to and from servers and network equipment.

In truth, the real difference between HTTP & FTP transfers won't make much difference to most people, unless you're doing a lot of large file transfers.

I don't agree so much with this statement. The difference transferring files with HTTP and FTP are two: 1.) As I mentioned, many people don't have or allow FTP, so the web designer uses HTTP to do it. 2.) I would venture to guess that most people that download large files would prefer to use FTP because of the speed/performance you mentioned.

? - How do the "P2P" programs transfer files - such as Kazaa, Napster, Morpheus, etc.? Do they use FTP, TFTP, HTTP, or something else ...

 

[johnwill]

P2P applications don't use any protocol that you'd recognize. They each have their own flavor, and it's "home rolled" with socket level API calls.

I truthfully haven't noticed any significant difference in downloading speeds between FTP and HTTP, as far as throughput on my end is concerned. All of your updates from Microsoft Update are HTTP, and their transfer speeds seem to match my FTP speeds from other sites pretty closely. Of course, I have not done an exhaustive study, since even with a lot of downloads, broadband makes it painless, FTP or HTTP!

 

[JAMMAN]

P2P applications don't use any protocol that you'd recognize. They each have their own flavor, and it's "home rolled" with socket level API calls.

I truthfully haven't noticed any significant difference in downloading speeds between FTP and HTTP, as far as throughput on my end is concerned. All of your updates from Microsoft Update are HTTP, and their transfer speeds seem to match my FTP speeds from other sites pretty closely. Of course, I have not done an exhaustive study, since even with a lot of downloads, broadband makes it painless, FTP or HTTP!

I second that motion, I don't notice much of a difference in speed. I let friends download large movie and music files from my computer using BPFTP and Simple Server both with the same results. (for those of you not familiar with these BPFTP is a popular FTP program you can run from any windoze computer, and Simple Server is an ultra cool free program from Mark at Analog X, covering the HTTP protocol)