[Seaside] Convincing Web Application shops to use seaside

[Avi Bryant]

On Sun, 15 Jun 2003 gsa at softhome.net wrote:

> 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.

Well, that's not necessarily true.  It should be possible to get the
overhead for a Seaside image and vm down to 2 or 3 MB without too much
trouble.  So in theory you could have a few hundred images running on the
same server.

However, Seaside sessions are indeed quite memory hungry themselves
(particularly because the implementation of Continuation is not
optimized... you end up with a lot of extra MethodContexts kicking
around), and so in practice even if you start with a 2MB image you'll
easily get back up to 32MB once you have 100 concurrent sessions or so.

Keeping the memory footprint down is definitely something I need to work
on (and there's lots of relatively low hanging fruit), but the fact is
that Seaside is always going to burn more resources than a mod_perl site -
that's the price you pay for abstraction.  I think it's more useful to
compare it to something like a Tomcat installation... good luck getting
200 or 300 servlet containers running on the same box.

Avi