There is certainly large-scale server software written in Smalltalk, and 
some of it runs large-scale web sites. The most obvious public example is 
EZBoard, which runs its servers entirely on Smalltalk (VisualWorks, not 
Squeak, but the process model is similar). Last time I heard statistics, 
which is a couple of years ago now, it was in the top 30 web sites in the 
world in terms of volume. So the process model doesn't seem to be a problem 
that way.  We've had companies running both Smalltalk and Java on their 
servers report that Smalltalk was significantly more stable.

Also, in server software, native threading is not necessarily a blessing. 
For example, the Opentalk distributed programming system was ported from 
VisualWorks (which has "green" threads) to ObjectStudio, which uses native 
threads. Some things didn't work, because in VisualWorks it was entirely 
reasonable to spawn dozens or hundreds of threads to perform tasks, and 
worked well. Forking Windows threads in the same way gave performance and 
stability problems. You typically see this in e.g. Java where servers have 
to carefully manage thread pools rather than just using threads.

At 02:22 PM 4/14/2005, Ramiro Diaz Trepat wrote:
>On 4/14/05, Tim Rowledge <tim at sumeru.stanford.edu> wrote:
>Ramiro Diaz Trepat <ramirodt at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > I believe that no serious server software will ever be possible
> > > without preemtive multitasking, probably no client sofware either.
> > Really? Have you not read about SeaSide, possibly the best webserver 
> around?
> > And we have a variety of net clients for things like IRC, mail, ftp, a
> > webbrowser etc.
>Are you serious ????
>I appreciate A LOT all the improvements in Squeak applications, and
>the servers like SeaSide, but if you really think that they can
>compete (any of them) with their non Squeak counterparts in the real
>world, you have to be the most irrational guy I red in years.
>Why do you think that no large web site uses Squeak?  Just because
>they are stupid computer illiterates?  The guys at Amazon, e-Bay,
>Google, Yahoo; they are just jerks, right?
>
>
> > There is no standard for 'native' threads that we could adhere to; 
> every damn
> > OS does it its own way, usually awkwardly. Native threads don't synchronise
> > with our requirements for VM & object coherence either.
>I know that languages like Java managed to do it properly, so I don't
>believe that argument.   Application Servers that are completely built
>in Java run perfectly on Windows, Linux, Solaris, etc. I see this
>every day.
>So there has to be a way.
>
>--
>http://neosmt.com

--
Alan Knight [|], Cincom Smalltalk Development
knight at acm.org
aknight at cincom.com
http://www.cincom.com/smalltalk

"The Static Typing Philosophy: Make it fast. Make it right. Make it run." - 
Niall Ross