[Seaside] Re: Apache frontend for Squeak, mod_scgi ?

cg at cdegroot.com cg at cdegroot.com
Sat Sep 27 10:17:55 CEST 2003


Jimmie Houchin  <seaside at lists.squeakfoundation.org> said:
>I am currently building a website.
>I would like to use Squeak but am concerned about performance and 
>stability. 

Why, you'll be getting more than ~50 hits per second? Do you have any
numbers to share? Because it is hard to talk about performance
requirements if you don't have any data to base discussions on.

>Apache and Python, Quixote to be specific.
>http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/quixote/
>
I looked at Quixote a couple of years ago, and I liked it. Not as
much as Smalltalk, though ;-)

>Much of the performance of Quixote is from using Apache as the webserver 
>instead of a Python based server. The most popular means of achieving 
>that is via mod_scgi.

That is because the alternative, starting the Python interpreter over
and over again through a CGI script, sucks performance-wise (that's why
I'm doing simple Python CGI on all my wiki's and other interactive pages
on my homepage, www.cdegroot.com, which gets around 200,000 hits per
month (and every page hit renders a dynamic bit through starting Python
process).  Remember it is *relative* performance we're discussing here,
a multi-gigaherz box takes away a lot of the pain here.

Anyway, Squeak just runs in all configurations - you don't start it up
per hit, but you start up Squeak as application server, and whether
the requests between Apache and Squeak are forwarded through mod_proxy,
mod_lisp, mod_scgi, mod_fcgi, or mod_my_mod_is_better_than_yours, does
not really matter. Maybe at the very high end, where the overhead of
socket creation with simple mod_proxy starts to count, this choice
becomes important; however, I wouldn't worry too much about it at this
stage. 

FYI, a benchmark - I'm running www.tric.nl on a dog-slow overloaded
PII/400. The site is based on Gardner and Janus, beta-level software that
is totally stupid about optimization, because every page is rendered
twice for every hit. While me and my wife were concurrently working on
the box (viva VNC), and pisg was sucking CPU because it was updating my
IRC stats pages, a locally-running 'ab' could still suck 4 pages per
second from it.

That's lousy, for sure, and /me should do some profiling, but it does
establish a nice bottom line: will you be happy with 4p/s? If yes,
please forget about performance :-)

Hth

Cees
-- 
Cees de Groot               http://www.cdegroot.com     <cg at cdegroot.com>
GnuPG 1024D/E0989E8B 0016 F679 F38D 5946 4ECD  1986 F303 937F E098 9E8B
Cogito ergo evigilo



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