[Seaside] Seaside Scaling - How successful?

[James Foster]

Hi Rich,

Welcome to Seaside.

If you are looking at 100K sessions per month, that seems to be 2-3  
per minute (am I doing the math properly?). I believe that most  
Seaside implementations would easily handle 2-3 pages per second!

You mentioned GemStone/S (disclaimer: I work for GemStone), and we  
have done some performance testing using various platforms. See Dale's  
blog at http://gemstonesoup.wordpress.com/2007/10/19/scaling-seaside-with-gemstones/ 
  for an analysis done many months ago. The general message is that  
with a single CPU and 1 GB of RAM for a cache, you can look at a  
steady state of a million pages per day (~12/second). If you need to  
scale further, then you need to pay for hardware and software  
licenses. Getting to 100 pages per second is quite doable; getting to  
1000 pages per second would require some higher-end hardware. Dale has  
set his sites on numbers much beyond that (10K to 100K per second),  
but it seems it will require something other than an out-of-the-box  
setup.

As to hosting, I recently set up a personal site on SliceHost.com. I  
am paying $20/month for a 256MB slice and running GemStone/S on the  
server. A very unscientific experiment was to open to the counter  
application and click it as fast as I could. I got the counter to over  
90 in 60 seconds, so was serving at least 1-1/2 pages per second (and  
that is from a single client over the web; multiple clients should be  
able to overlap without much overhead).

As to training, I will be teaching a couple tutorials at OOPSLA in  
Nashville in October, one is on web technologies in general and the  
other is on Seaside in particular. That would be one opportunity to  
get some education.

James


On Aug 18, 2008, at 11:33 AM, Rich wrote:

> I've been looking for a framework that will grow with my company's  
> projected online growth rate and Seaside looks very interesting.  We  
> developed a Java based web site for a beta product, but I'm not  
> happy with the results or the amount of code/time required to make  
> things work with Java.  I'm looking for something that will have a  
> faster implementation and also scale well as we grow.  I stumbled  
> across Seaside on Blog post and thought I'd take a look.  Seaside  
> looks like it has some very nice features and I've been spending the  
> last couple of days doing some of the tutorials and watching several  
> of the "Why Seaside" talks.  Thanks to your community for posting  
> those.
>
> I do have some reservations about Seaside and I'm hoping that the  
> members of this list can point me in the right direction for the  
> answers or have some of their own success stories.  Here are my  
> concerns at this point in time:
>
> Scalability - How does one scale Seaside?  I've seen GemStone/S to  
> help with persistence and using Apache for static content.  These  
> seem very logical, but I'm still wondering what it takes in hardware  
> to support 1K, 10K and 100K unique visitors per month to a Seaside  
> based site.  I know this will be code dependent, but I'm interested  
> in seeing 1) if its even possible to hit in excess of 100K visitors  
> per month and 2) what it would take from a hardware perspective to  
> hit this number of visitors.
>
> Memory Requirements - I read in the archives, and I'm betting this  
> is an older pre 2.8 rev memory number, it takes 2M per client for  
> Seaside.  Is this still the case?
>
> Hosting - What is the best way to host Seaside if you want to use  
> someone else's hardware?  Has anyone implemented an AMI on AWS for  
> hosting?
>
> Success Stories - Any success stories where a site is servicing in  
> excess of 5K visitors per day using Seaside?  If so, what did it  
> take to get here and would you do it again?  How are you handling  
> persistence?  What is your limit based on current hardware/software?
>
> Learn Seaside  - What is the best way to learn Seaside for a non- 
> Smalltalk developer?
>
>
> Any information you could provide that would help me make this  
> decision would be much appreciated.
>
> Thanks for your time.
>
> Rich
>
> _______________________________________________
> seaside mailing list
> seaside at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside
>