[Seaside] Linux Seaside server problem

Lukas Renggli renggli at gmail.com
Fri Dec 1 20:57:56 UTC 2006


> So this means seaside/squeak can not be considered stable for a
> production environment on linux machines?

No.

What you have to consider is that in a standard LAMP setup you get the
stability by restarting the systems all the time: The Apache server
has a pool of threads doing the actual serving that all get re-created
from time to time. I assume it is the same for MySQL and PHP. That's
where the stability is coming from. It is not a real stability, it is
just fail-save.

In Smalltalk you have only one object memory. Therefor you need to be
careful with your system. You wont allow it to crash every now and
then like other application servers do. That this is possible shows so
many Seaside images running for years without interruption. This is
what I call stable. Of course, even for the most stable environment,
it is worth to have a system checking that everything is still fine
and properly working.

> What about seaside/visualworks?

That's the same.

> What should I do if I plan a seaside application to go live?

Unfortunately stability cannot be got for free. Choosing the right VM
is certainly a difficult point. Choosing the right image and packages
as well. Doing the right things in the code, and especially avoiding
the wrong ones, helps as well. Deeply testing (SUnit-Tests, load
tests, manual testing) is the best insurance you can get.

During incremental development it is a good practice to gather
knowledge about working deployment configurations by setting up test
servers from time to time to see what works and performs well and what
doesn't.

Lukas

-- 
Lukas Renggli
http://www.lukas-renggli.ch


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