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

[cg at cdegroot.com]

Jimmie Houchin  <seaside at lists.squeakfoundation.org> said:
>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.
>
I recall that 90 rps was considered extremely good back when I was being
a kewl dude in the dotcom boom. It'll allow you to serve some 3 million
hits per day without getting into real trouble. And of course, you're
not going to deploy on a lousy 700Mhz Athlon anyway, so double that
number.

Now, if I'd had an ecommerce site that was generating money (this is
post dotcom boom, so I'm just going to take a giant leap here and assume
that these 3 million hits will actually help you to make money), I'd look
into a load-balancing solution anyway. Never bet your cool site that
makes lots of money on a single box. Rent a rack, and start with 8
machines - 2 LVS loadbalancers that monitor each other with Heartbeat, 2
first-tier Apache webservers, 2 second-tier Squeak appservers (maybe get
creative here with the handback module?), and 2 database backend servers
that are replicated with NBD or MySQL's replication stuff, monitoring
each other with Heartbeat. You'd want the database machines to be
SCSI-based, with a mirrored solution RAID is optional but could help
performance. Oh, and shell out for some Xeons, the added cache really
helps.

That, in my not so humble opinion, constitutes a Serious e-Commerce Setup[tm]. 

If Squeak becomes a bottleneck, go to Rackservers'r'Us and
click in another box. Who cares. You don't win by saving money on
hardware (make the calculation: 1x US$1000 rackserver, depreciated
over 36 months - wew, that'll hit your books with a full 28 dollars per
month!), you win by being better at developing the kind of services your
customers want. If you don't believe that, stay out of business. If you
do believe that, don't be preoccupied with performance figures but
choose whatever development environment you think will give you the best
site, fastest. 



-- 
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