[Seaside] Convincing Web Application shops to use seaside

[Andreas Raab]

> One additional thing to take in account is the web hosting of 
> the Seaside apps. If in a common Linux Server it's possible to host
> php or perl apps until quantities of 100-200 sites with good performance,
> with Seaside, running Squeak in a headless mode, a minimun of 32 MB
> ram must be assigned to each VM.

I don't know about the requirements of Seaside itself but the above sounds
pretty bogus to me. First of all, you should not consider an out-of-the-box
Squeak+Seaside to be a Seaside production image. A *little* work on your end
is to be expected and this work should probably include doing a little
shrinking. Even with the most rudimentary methods you should be able to
trivially get down to 16MB.

Secondly, IIRC, then Ian's latest VMs support dynamically growing and
shrinking memory. In effect that means your SeaSide image will only consume
as much memory as it really needs (modulo a bit of headroom which can be
customized too). That means the initial requirement is just that of loading
the image which, for a SeaSide production image, I would expect to be
definitely less than 8MB.

Thirdly, there is swap space which you can throw at it. Most OSes these days
make pretty good use of it so your division is a rather random guess
considering that there are tons of objects in a "typical" Squeak image which
can be swapped out without any negative side effects whatsoever.

All in all, I would claim that your stated "requirements" might be true -
but only for an overly naive use of SeaSide in a production environment. If
you just put your mind to it a little, you should be able to get
*drastically* below that.

Cheers,
  - Andreas

PS. For marketing SeaSide it might be worthwhile to have a set of
step-by-step instruction for how to make that "SeaSide production image"
work.