On 15/03/2012, at 8:56 PM, Szczepan Faber <[email protected]> wrote:
> I have this working for the target artifact (e.g. the jar), but not for the
> metadata (e.g. pom.xml, ivy.xml). So, do we want to avoid downloading
> unchanged metadata files? Metadata files are typically small so the gains
> won't be as significant as with artifacts, but I do think it's worth doing.
>
> Me too. Network hit is still a hit.
In this particular case, we still hit the network but don't have to download
the artifact.
Basically, we ask the server to only send back the file if it's changed since
last time we downloaded it. If it hasn't, the response is just a special status
code with no content, otherwise it's the full file. This is a feature of HTTP.
So there still is a hit, but if the metadata file is big or the link is slow
their is an advantage.
