Re: Multiple Displays vs One Display

[Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Yes, in this day and age we are no longer concerned with whether
> the program is in memory or not -- the OS handles that.

I probably should have said that most Web programs remain active (their state is preserved) after the initial load as well as remain in memory.  In the case of CGI the OS may page the memory from RAM to disk and back, but in the case of Servlets and PHP scripts, their runtime environments determine where the Servlet or script is in memory or not.

> But the main difference between SRT and MRT is whether the program
> has to maintain information about the requester's process -- an SRT
> program does not,
 an MRT program does.

That from my perspective makes Web applications more like MRT.

> The web programs I see would be like an SRT program because they
> would get all necessary data from the browser to handle a request --
> they would not rely on data stored in the program's working memory.

It seems to me that most Web applications may get a cookie or session key from the browser, but generally save and restore browser state data in memory or user spaces or files, which sounds more like MRT.

> Having the web program store any info about a requester seems an
> unlikely proposition given that it could be handling thousands if not
> millions
 of requesters.

Actually it seems to me that the majority of Web applications do save and restore state related data for every request from every requester, even when a single instance of the program may be handling requests from thousands of concurrent users.

Nathan.