[Mailman-Developers] REST API speed

[Barry Warsaw]

On Jul 10, 2015, at 10:47 AM, Andrew Stuart wrote:

>Correct me if I’m wrong but effectively gunicorn would need to run the rest
>server within itself, so it would be necessary to run the rest server outside
>the mailman runners? I’m not sure how to do so.

Most of the RESTRunner is probably not applicable to the gunicorn case.
Runners themselves are forked from the master watcher, so the warnings about
threads is there solely because we have to run the .server_forever() call in a
separate thread within the rest runner process, otherwise the main thread will
block and we won't be able to use the Runner infrastructure to kill it when
`mailman stop` is issued.

># Both the REST server and the signal handlers must run in the main
># thread; the former because of SQLite requirements (objects created
># in one thread cannot be shared with the other threads), and the
># latter because of Python's signal handling semantics.

I'm honestly not sure that SQLite restriction is applicable any more, at least
for this particular case.  Maybe it was once when we were using Storm.  But I
think it's generally acknowledged that production systems should probably be
backed by a client/server database, although SQLite may work fine for smaller
sites.

>rest/wsgiapp.py also has the following function which seems to be the right
>wsgi app function to pass into gunicorn. I couldn’t find the right
>incantation to get it to run standlone.
>
>def make_application():
>    """Create the WSGI application.
>
>    Use this if you want to integrate Mailman's REST server with your own WSGI
>    server.
>    """
>    return RootedAPI(Root())

The intention is that this would work; what problems have you seen?

My thinking is that a gunicorn -or other external wsgi server- based REST
runner wouldn't do much more than run gunicorn with the proper commands in a
subprocess, and manage its PID so that the runner itself could response to
`mailman stop` and `restart` commands.

If that works, I could see adding runner subclasses to runners/rest.py such
that a site could change `[runner.rest]class` in their mailman.cfg file to
select say the gunicorn based REST server over the default wsgiref one.

Cheers,
-Barry
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