I wrote both the WebDAV client (backend) for rclone and the WebDAV server. This means you can sync to and from WebDAV servers or mount them just fine. You can also expose your filesystem as a WebDAV server (or your S3 bucket or Google Drive etc).
The RFCs for WebDAV are better than those for FTP but there is still an awful lot of not fully specified stuff which servers and clients choose to do differently which leads to lots of workarounds.
The protocol doesn't let you set modification times by default which is important for a sync tool, but popular implementations like owncloud and nextcloud do. Likewise with hashes.
However the protocol is very fast, much faster than SFTP with it's homebrew packetisation as it's based on well optimised web tech, HTTP, TLS etc.
In your opinion, is WebDAV good enough to be the protocol for exposing file systems over HTTP, or is there room for something better? I was bullish on Solid but they don't seem to be making much progress.
NFS is much slower, maybe unless you deploy it which RDMA. I believe even 4.2 doesn’t really support asynchronous calls or has some significant limitations around them - I’ve commonly seen a single large write of a few gigs starve all other operations including lstat for minutes.
Also it’s borderline impossible to tune nfs to go above 30gbps or so consistently, with WebDAV it’s a matter of adding a bunch more streams and you’re past 200gbps pretty easily.
The RFCs for WebDAV are better than those for FTP but there is still an awful lot of not fully specified stuff which servers and clients choose to do differently which leads to lots of workarounds.
The protocol doesn't let you set modification times by default which is important for a sync tool, but popular implementations like owncloud and nextcloud do. Likewise with hashes.
However the protocol is very fast, much faster than SFTP with it's homebrew packetisation as it's based on well optimised web tech, HTTP, TLS etc.