Production Web Deployment?

[Skip Montanaro]

>>>>> "Dirk" == Dirk Leas <dirkl at home.com> writes:

    Dirk> Is anybody taking lots of hits with httpdapy, PyApache,
    Dirk> ASP+Python, fastcgi, or Zope?

I use a combination of Apache and ZServer (from the Zope distribution) and a
separate backend database server on the Musi-Cal web server:

    Apache --HTTP proxy--> ZServer --XML/RPC--> db server

Apache handles several virtual servers, but the main one is Musi-Cal.  On
behalf of Musi-Cal it handled about 65K hits in the past two days.  Many of
those hits get proxied off to the ZServer (almost all html files are run
through DocumentTemplate and all search requests are passed off).  The
ZServer handled 21K requests in the past two days.  In addition, the
database server handles XML-RPC requests from a second machine on the same
physical network (www.mojam.com) that uses Mason (Apache + mod_perl + Mason
components).  Musi-Cal's database server handled about 160K requests of one
sort or another in the past two days (search URLs can result in several
XML-RPC calls and we do lots of other backend queries in support of other
activities).

I figure the Musi-Cal server is handling about 1.2M web hits per month right
now.  It's a Pentium II 400MHz w/ 128MB of memory running RedHat Linux 5.2
(264 bogomips according to /proc/cpuinfo).  The load average runs around 0.3
during the day with bursts above 1.0 every 15-30 minutes.  The hardware has
been up for almost 50 days.  I restart the software servers for various
reasons typically once or twice a day, however.

We have a more powerful dual processor machine (450+450 bogomips) that we
were using but set aside because of Linux SMP problems.  We've yet to buckle
down and address them.  Mostly we just wait for new stable revs of the
kernel and try again.  Given the performance of our current server, I don't
expect to be pressed to put it back into server for awhile yet.

Skip Montanaro | http://www.mojam.com/
skip at mojam.com | http://www.musi-cal.com/
847-971-7098   | Python: Programming the way Guido indented...