OpenLC 0.5 released!

[Francesc Alted]

OpenLC 0.5 is out. Version 0.4 was internal and will never be released.

What is?

OpenLC is a client/server software designed to facilitate benchmarking and
stress testing of a wide variety of information servers (such as web, email,
FTP, LDAP, databases, and so on). The package is built around a microkernel
that contains basic routines for benchmarking tasks, such as accessing
intermediate results in real-time ("spying" on run data), setting up
simulated clients, defining scenarios, handling database calls, comparing
results of different runs, summarizing data, etc. 

What's new:

- Refactored a lot of code. Now, almost all the code (even the client) should
have an Object Oriented shape.

- Introduced an internal state machine for OpenLC server. That way your
opportunities to mess it sending methods in incorrect order are reduced by
orders of magnitude.

- New filedata format for raw data: changed from a ZODB database to a
BerkeleyDB RECNO fomat. This is because I detected a memory leak in the ZODB
database when using the IOBTree format and save into it lots of data. Now,
the memory consumption has been reduced a lot!. Also, the speed of data store
and retrieve has incremented in a factor of 2.

- The statistical module (ReduceData.py) has improved a lot, and it
calculates intermediate means, standard deviations, minimum, maximum,
skewness, as well as grand totals for the run. Now, Numerical Python and
Scientific Python packages are used to speed-up the calculations.

- The summary for each run is stored in a NetCDF file, so you can visualize
it very easily with any graphical plotter which reads this format, as Grace,
ncBrowse or VisAD.

- The Internal Servers have been splited out, so each one (normally a
descendent class of GenericLoader) is in its own source file.

- A new IMAP4 Internal Server has been introduced. It doesn't support all the
IMAP4rev1, but it's enough to do some interesting benchmarking.


Enjoy!

-- 
Francesc Alted                            PGP KeyID:      0x61C8C11F
OpenLC microkernel benchmarking project: http://www.openlc.org
Public PGP key available: http://www.openlc.org/falted_at_openlc.asc
Key fingerprint = 1518 38FE 3A3D 8BE8 24A0  3E5B 1328 32CC 61C8 C11F