[Seaside] Does Seaside/Squeak ready for production use ?

[radoslav hodnicak]

On Fri, 24 Dec 2004, Dmitry Dorofeev wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I consider Seaside/Squeak as a possible platform to implement
> real e-commerce site comparable with things like http://www.flightstore.co.uk/
> While it seems for me that Smalltalk/Seaside is superior platform for programming
> and prototyping ideas it is not clear how stable and quick it is in real life.
> The questions i have:
>
> 1. The project requires headless squeak running on remote server. Is there any
> proven way to update the code and apply fixes remotely in this case. (Yes i know,
> this was discussed recently in the list)

Well you could use the native VNC server implemented in squeak - so the
image runs headless yet you can connect to it and get gui. I just run
normal VNC (and squeak inside of it)  because it's more convenient.

> 2. Is there live seaside/squeak sites with heavy loads. We looking to support
> 2000 unique visitors per day and 2 hits per second to the content pages. Is that
> possible on Intel hardware ?

My application is an intranet one so it doesn't have that much load, but
some simple httperf tests I made indicate that I can generate about 5-10
pages per second - this includes fetching the objects from postgres via
glorp. Machine is dual amd/2.8Ghz

> 3. Is there any ways to use server-side caching or static pages for
> styles/javascripts which i belive are generates dynamically. As i can see each
> click in browser generates 2-3 requests to Seaside, for HTML,CSS and JS ?

Static css and scripts (i.e. from the libraries) should have constant URL
during the lifetime of the session so the browser should cache those
itself.

> 4. Is there any tricks to make Google happy with seaside sessions and URLs ?

You can put your own stuff in the URL (#updateUrl:), not sure what you
want google to see

> 5. I tried really simple tests with perl script, which just traverses
> Sushi shop demo provided with Seaside to check stability. It looks ok, as
> robot was run for 3 days without problems. I started it time to time after that.
> Image files are now grown to the sizes (bytes)
>  17715866 seaside-books.changes
>  95248000 seaside-books.image
> It may be cached sessions data, but i believe it should be freed up ? Any comments on
> image size ? I can send Perl script to the list on request. original image was
> Squeak3.7-5989-basic

the .changes file is just source code. what you should try is
WARegistry clearAllHandlers and then collect garbage. Otherwise the
sessions and all the objects are still referenced and won't be collected

As for stability, my current production image runs since june or so. I had
some segfaults before from bugs that resulted in infinite loop, but now I
run a stack watcher that kills the offending process.

> 6. What is people expirience with GOODS, is it ready for production ? Combination GOODS
> for objects + MySQL/PostrgreSQL for easy search on data. I.e. mixed approach.

I use only postgres, no experience with goods.

> 8. Encryption. S/MIME is required. I can use OpenSSL lib for that, any hints how to
> do that ?

I don't know what s/mime is. Apache handles SSL for me (also static file
dowloads, pictures etc)

rado