(Catching up. At some point someone might want to summerize all this to the
Swiki so we don't go through it *yet again* :))

(This someone probably isn't me :))

At 8:23 PM -0500 11/9/99, John.Maloney at disney.com wrote:

[snip]


>How much performance will you be able to get out of a Squeak-based
>server on the Mac? I hope that will be limited only by the speed of
>your hardware and the quality of the underlying OS socket implementation.

WebStar of several years ago, on a PowerMac 6100, could saturate a T-1 line
(at least when servering static pages). I hold that as a good upper goal
for standard Squeak serving.

>At OOPSLA, I heard some very impressive stories about the performance
>of commericial Smalltalk-based web servers. I believe Squeak is capable
>of similar high performance. Note that a typical commercial web server
>under Unix involves spawning several Unix processes to handle the request.
>Because the PWS does everything with lightweight Smalltalk threads,
>the potential performance is even higher, I believe.

Theoretically, it should be, especially if one can get round the
blocking/non-blocking socket issue. This is certainly what drives the
performance of Erlang's web servers.

> However, I know
>very little about web serving, and there may be good reasons for
>structuring a web server as several processes,

The standard reason, IIUC, is to use blocking sockets. There was a nice
interview Of Chuck Shotton of( MacHTTP and WebStar fame) a couple of months
ago where he talks about implementing a Mac Web server. IMHO, many of the
design issues are the same for Squeak.

> such as the ability
>to have a front-end process that multiplexes incoming requests across
>a number of back-end servers on different machines.

Actually, there's a very cool web farm implementation in Erlang (eddie).
Still lightwight threads :)

>When will we convert the Mac network primitives to Open Transport? All
>I can say at this point is that (a) we know it has to be done and
>(b) it has to be done by the time OS X comes to desktop Macs. I'd
>be interested in hearing from folks on the Squeak list who are
>need this. I already know about Mark Guzdial.

Me!

[snip]

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.