[Seaside] HTTP Performance

[Avi Bryant]

On Nov 19, 2003, at 6:32 AM, Sven Van Caekenberghe wrote:

> 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.

One thing that might change the apparent responsiveness is to go into 
the configuration page for your Seaside app and set "Always Redirect" 
to false.  This will cut the number of HTTP requests made in half.

However, I should also say that performance simply hasn't been a 
priority yet.  We haven't yet had a deployment of Seaside (or I haven't 
heard about one) where the hardware we were running it on was 
insufficient for the load it was getting, even given the poor 
optimization of the framework.  I am sure this will happen before long, 
and at that point I'll have to do some serious profiling and speed 
things up.  I'll probably try to take a couple of hours tonight and see 
if there's any low hanging fruit I can grab.  Please don't run away 
because of these initial results - we're committed to making this a 
viable platform for enterprise development.

Like Stephen, I'm intrigued by your 50rps figure for Comanche - that's 
the number that I always seem to come up with as well.  There *must* be 
something throttling that, and we need to get to the bottom of it.

Avi