[Seaside] HTTP Performance

[Sven Van Caekenberghe]

Let me start by saying that I like Seaside (and Squeak) a lot. I am 
really amazed at how much design and abstraction there is hidden 
underneath, and how flexible Smalltalk code really is (and how much fun 
it is to work in such a powerful integrated environment).

However, since I started evaluating writing and deploying web 
applications in Squeak (only about two weeks ago), the final HTML 
interface as approached by a browser, felt a little bit slow.

First, I re-implemented our calculator example in Lisp (minus the 
backtracking support), and it was clear that there was a significant 
speed difference: it was very easy to 'out-click' the seaside based 
calculator, which was a lot harder to do with the Lisp version.

Then I decided to do a simple benchmark to really compare HTTP 
performance:

   http://homepage.mac.com/svc/DW-Bench/index.html

I compared dynamic and static HTTP performance of JBoss, Lisp and 
Smalltalk.

The Seaside/Comanche results for Squeak were consistent, but slow. I do 
not know enough about the performance characteristics of Squeak to have 
an educated opinion about these results.

Does anybody care to run the tests themselves ?
Does anybody, those with production Seaside/Comanche/Squeak based 
sites, care to comment ?
What can be done to make things faster ?

Sven