[Standards-JIG] NEW: XEP-0198 (Stanza Acknowledgements)

[Justin Karneges]

On Wednesday 22 November 2006 12:42 pm, Philipp Hancke wrote:
> XMPP Extensions Editor wrote:
> [...]
>
> Is it possible to negotiate ack and ping separate from each other?
> Implementing ping-pong is trivial, implementing ack looks more
> difficult (currently) and I think I would like to have
> stream level ping-pong NOW.

We first need to decide what the meaning of the stream-level ping-ping should 
be.  Traditionally, a pong indicates that all data sent over the TCP 
connection prior to the ping has been received.  However, XEP-0198 introduces 
the concept of "acceptance" as independent from a pong, in order to reconcile 
the issue of connection throttling (often called "karma") and ping timeouts.  
Therefore, a XEP-0198 ping-pong cannot be used to determine of stanzas have 
been received.  It is purely just to test if the TCP connection is alive.

I'm not opposed to decoupling ack and ping, but the XEP-0198 ping is slightly 
special, and its meaning only makes sense within the context of the whole 
spec.

I'm still interested to hear what people think about XEP-0198's attempt to 
play nice with throttling.  Does anyone care about this?  What is the state 
of throttling in modern servers today?  Do servers do it anymore?  Does 
anyone else but me notice the problem you get when you combine throttling and 
N-second ping timeouts?

-Justin