[Seaside] Swazoo vs. Apache benchmarks

[Janko Mivšek]

Hi Philippe,

Philippe Marschall wrote:

>> I think we can conclude that Swazoo (at least on VW for now) is actually
>> able to serve quite demanding web sites, but as we already said, Swazoo
>> is not there to compete with Apache but to be a simple starting step,
>> which can later evolve if needed to the most demanding serving on Apache.
> 
> I can not agree at all. If we look closer at your numbers Squeak realy
> even breaks the 1 MB/s barrier (B = bit?). Without any handbreaks on
> and without any tuning Apache on my local machine serves 60 to 120
> Mbyte/s. That's what a fast ethernet connection can theoretically
> deliver.

B=byte, b= bit. My faster Apache benchmark is 156MBytes/s which is 
therefore near yours results.
> 
> What's worse is that serving files with Squeak is not only slow but
> also hogs the CPU. Since Squeak can use only one core serving files
> with Squeak takes away desperatly needed CPU cycles from Seaside
> (Seaside is a very inefficient framework). On a modern CPU Squeak can
> only use a fourth of the available processing power. I do not want to
> give any of that away because I don't use the right tool for the job.
> 
> But the real killer is that Squeak can not handle a sustained load. Do
> something like:
> 
> ab -c 10 -n 1000000
> http://127.0.0.1:9090/seaside/files/WADispatcherFiles/logo.png
> 
> This will toast your Squeak image. It will take a very long time
> because Squeak is so slow and after that your Squeak image will still
> hog the CPU and stop reacting.

True, when you go over the max requests/s threshold, performance starts 
to deteriorate very fast. Apache seems to start intentionally breaking 
connections in that case.

> To sum up: there a problems for with Smalltalk is not the right tool.
> Serving static files is such job. We should stop pretending that all
> our problems are nails.

As others already said, Swazoo is primary meant for our web frameworks 
while static file serving is just for some small stuff you usually have 
around. I'm  doing benchmarks on static serving only to measure Swazoo 
strengths, nothing more. From memory serving results are therefore most 
interesting for us.

Janko


-- 
Janko Mivšek
AIDA/Web
Smalltalk Web Application Server
http://www.aidaweb.si