[Seaside] Apache frontend for Squeak, mod_scgi ?

Jimmie Houchin jhouchin at texoma.net
Fri Sep 26 15:00:17 CEST 2003


Hello Colin,

Colin Putney wrote:
> On Friday, September 26, 2003, at 10:05  AM, Jimmie Houchin wrote:
> 
>> My apologies for a general Squeak web question. But it seems this is 
>> where most of the web developers for Squeak are. :)
>>
>> I am currently building a website.
>> I would like to use Squeak but am concerned about performance and 
>> stability. Due to that I am seriously (reasonably so) considering 
>> using Apache and Python, Quixote to be specific.
>> http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/quixote/
> 
> Hi Jimmie,
> 
> Can you tell us more about what type of site you're building, and what 
> your concerns are?
>
> I've had good results using Apache + mod_proxy + Comanche + Seaside. 
> That's useful in a situation where only *part* of the website needs to 
> be dynamic, and the rest can be served statically by Apache. Does this 
> fit your situation?

I can't go into details about the site yet. But it will be an ecommerce 
type site. Possibly have ads sometime in the future. Amazon is a 
reasonable analogy. Users, with preferences, much of the content 
reasonably static but interspersed with dynamic pieces.

I don't really know what mod_proxy does and how it helps with Squeak 
webapps.

> Are you concerned that Squeak will crash and need to be restarted? Does 
> mod_scgi automatically restart CGI services?

I am not really worried about Squeak crashing. I've not really 
experience Squeak behaving as such, but I've never placed it under a 
real heavy load as such.

> Do you expect such a high load that you'll need multiple apache servers 
> or some other high end load balancing scheme?

Performance is a major concern.
Apache2 on my home (development) machine, Gentoo, Athlon 700mhz, 1.25gb 
ram, delivers about 800 rps on a 25k file. From memory Squeak/Commanche 
(kom 6, squeak 3.5) gave about maybe 90 rps.

Apache2, mod_python 3, I've gotten between 150 and 400 rps for dynamic 
pages. mod_python serving the identical 25k page was at about 400.
mod_python running a script which opened 12 different small files, read 
the contents, plus the 25k file above, and some strings in the script 
and the files closed, serve all the above to the client each and every 
request, served at about 190 rps.

That is acceptable to me. How can I achieve that with Squeak?
Can I currently?

> By the way, I wasn't able to read the documentation on the SCGI 
> protocol. The domain it's hosted at seems to have expired or something. 
> I'm sure it would be possible to implement an SCGI server for Seaside, 
> although should say that I had a look at implementing FastCGI, and 
> decided it wasn't worth the effort.

The author of mod_scgi originally had a fastcgi module. He said it was 
too complex and too much trouble. That's why he developed scgi.

Back too the site.

I am currently planning on using MySQL for the database.
It will have 10s of millions of objects.

 From researching similar* websites I am hoping for up to 1m+ page views 
a day at some point.
(* I use similar loosely)
I've wanted this website for 5 years and it still doesn't exist.
I've slowly been working on the skills in my spare time to be able to 
develop my ideas. We'll see if anybody else shares my vision when its up. ;)

I would really like if Apache2 could cache the static portions of a page 
and request and insert the dynamic portions from Squeak. I don't think 
that is currently an option. I don't know.

Should I study up on mod_proxy? Will it help?

Jimmie



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