Re: Some suggestions about the protocol

robin nospam at acm.org
Tue, 9 Mar 1999 17:37:02 GMT

On Tue, 09 Mar 1999 09:08:30 -0700 Matthew Mastracci
<mmastrac nospam at ucalgary.ca> wrote:
> Will the client be responsible for first submitting the MD5 hash, and if that
> fails, resubmitting a request using the full TOC?
Yes, that seems like a good balance to me.

> I like the idea of only
> submitting a hash first, but with the speed of the hash function and power of
> the server, should the request be composed of just the TOC (and other vital
> information for the hash), which the server can MD5 itself to search for the
> exact match, and subsequently use to perform a fuzzy search if there is no
> exact match?
I'm assuming tha the fuzzy match is (relatively) hard work, so you don't
want the server doing that all the time. And remember, once the server
has successfully made a fuzzy match, it can store the hash of the
alternative too, so the next query with the same pressing will succeed
on the fast check.

> It would reduce the bandwidth requirement for CDs without exact
> matches (situations which I encounter fairly often while using CDDB). Would
> this be a serious drain on available bandwidth/computing power?
I don't know. Has anyone tried writing a fuzzy matcher? What sort of
things must it check? How many hits does a cddb server get?

Robin.

-- 
R.M.O'Leary <robin nospam at acm.org> +44 7010 7070 44, PO Box 20, Swansea SA2 8YB, UK