Serving files, what would be the best way?

[Benjamin Cabé]

Hi,

I have to serve TIFF images (scanned documents) stored on an unique server,
clients are likely to edit these images and send them back to the server..
Ideally, the client would ask something like "MemoryStream getImage(int
folderNumber, int pageNumber) and he will retrieve the stream corresponding
to he pageNumberth page in the folderNumberth folder!
Implementing this method in a Webservice (IIS 5.1 + flatcomp (to reduce
bandwidth, doesn't seem to handicap performances a lot, and allows to have a
base64 encoded SOAP response compressed to about the original file size))
has been a good solution but I'm worried about very random response times
(far better once the method is in the cache, obviously)
If I serve through a tcpChannel, it seems better (but it's not as flexible
than a ws)
Another solution would be to serve TIFF images via http or ftp and getImage
would return something like a FTP or HTTP URI, but here again it's not
flexible enough imho...
Also I could make a VPN between our different sites but.....

Any kind of suggestion would be very appreciated, because I've been
shilly-shalling for many days..! :-) If you've understood well, what I'm
most interested in is response time...

Thanks alot !
Benjamin

FU2 : m.p.d.framework.remoting