[Seaside] Newbie questions about Squeak and Seaside

William Harford seaside at harford.org
Thu Aug 24 18:30:36 UTC 2006


On Aug 24, 2006, at 1:05 PM, stephane ducasse wrote:

>>
>> We use Squeak/Seaside in a commercial setting and the speed is  
>> adequate.
>
> Can you tell us more?

Sure.

The page loads are around one second. My goal is to half that by the  
end of the year but there are a lot of hurtles to overcome before I  
can do that.

The slowest part of the application is data access. I currently use a  
OR mapping library that was written in a hurry (by me) and  
unfortunately it suffers from poor design and kludgy code. You are  
welcome to take a look at it but I ask that you don't hold it against  
me :-) http://squeaksource.com/IOSPersistent.html .

I have written another OR library, called REServe, that takes some of  
the concepts I liked from IOSPersistent and implements them in a  
much, much, much nicer fashion. Giving the developer better control  
over how things are stored, cleaner code, the database is abstracted,  
Smalltalk enumeration of the database,  PostgreSQL is supported, and  
much more. I am convinced that the new library has a future and will  
be releasing it to the public in the next couple weeks.

If you are interested in having a look at REServe let me know. The  
main reason for not releasing it yet it incomplete documentation and  
tests.

The current MySQL drivers for Squeak do not use Unix domain sockets.  
I have not looked into Squeak support for Unix sockets on squeak but  
if the MySQL drivers could be modified to access the server via Unix  
sockets that would give our application a speed boost. Any  
volunteers :-)

WeakArray ; What can I say that has not already been said. I fear  
that the implementation details of WeakReferences are currently over  
my head and I would need a bit of education before I attempted making  
finalization faster. I would really like to see this improved because  
I currently have to work around the problem.

I changed SeasidePlatformSupport #weakDictionaryOfSize: to read

    ^ IdentityDictionary new: aNumber

This means that our sessions grow until they are ended. It's not  
ideal but it works.

Instead of triggering the cleanup of expired sessions every n new  
session/requests (I can't remember which) I run a reaper process that  
checks every so often and cleans things up.

We run a document management application and as such we create a lot  
of WADocumentHandlers for thumbnails. WADocumentHandlers where not  
getting cleaned up until we cleared all Seaside caches and for our  
situation that was not reasonable. I changed WADocumentHandler so be  
a sub instance of WAExpiringHandler and have it expire after a couple  
hours (except for css files) and that seamed to keep our image size  
down.

Our image will get up to about 300MB. It runs on a server with 4G of  
ram so for us thats acceptable.

Our usage might not be typical. During the day we have 3-12 people  
working in the application doing data entry as fast as the  
application will go. Touching all parts of the application.

Another thing we did that greatly improved speed pair down some of  
the component creation.
Because components are not cleared after they are no longer  
referenced because of the above changes creating > 12 components on  
each page view was to much. To work around it I ask each model  
#canRender. If #canRender answers true I send the model  
#renderContentOn: html caller: parentComponet. The model can then  
render it's self with out registering a component. While this is not  
ideal it gets the job done.

There are other things but thats all I can remember for now.


> Is the application visible on the web?

The application is not public. If you are in the Toronto, ON or  
Orlando, FL area I will be more than happy to demo the application  
for you.

>
>> At one point I did port my application to VisualWorks and the  
>> speed was much improved but the price we were quoted was  
>> unacceptable ($130,000/year).
>
> Indeed you were making money apparently or the sales were doing  
> something wrong.
> you have also dolphin smalltalk :)

We run on Linux and it's essential to our operations. I don't see  
that changing anytime soon so unfortunately Dolphin is out of the  
question.

The VW sales person quoted me on number of expected users. She offer  
no other quote even after I pressed for it. In fact she seemed almost  
uninterested in our business. The price was 135 and that was that.

Personally I would like to see Squeak become an industrial strength  
platform. There is a lot of work to be done but there is also a  
growing interest. I might be biased but the future looks bright for  
Squeak to me.

Enough of my rambling.
Will



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