OT: why are LAMP sites slow?

[Al Dykes]

In article <kavad2-59d.ln1 at eskimo.tundraware.com>,
Tim Daneliuk  <tundra at tundraware.com> wrote:
>Paul Rubin wrote:
>
><SNIP>
>
>> I've only worked on one serious site of this type and it was "SAJO"
>> (Solaris Apache Java Oracle) rather than LAMP, but the concepts are
>> the same.  I just feel like something bogus has to be going on.  I
>> think even sites like Slashdot handle fewer TPS than a 1960's airline
>> reservation that ran on hardware with a fraction of the power of one
>> of today's laptops.
>
>I worked for an Airline computer reservation system (CRS) for almost a
>decade. There is nothing about today's laptops that remotely comes close
>to the power of those CRS systems, even the old ones. CRS systems are
>optimized for extremely high performance I/O and use an operating system
>(TPF) specifically designed for high-performance transaction processing.
>
>Web servers are very sessions oriented: make a connection-pass the unit
>of work-drop the connection. This is inherently slow (and not how high
>performance TP is done). Moreover, really high perfomance requires a
>very fine level of I/O tuning on the server - at the CRS I worked for,
>they performance people actually only populated part of the hard drives
>to minimize head seeks.
>
>The point is that *everything* has to be tuned for high performance
>TP - the OS, the language constructs (we used assembler for most things),
>the protocols, and the overall architecture.  THis is why, IMHO,
>things like SOAP a laughable - RPC is a poor foundation for reliable,
>durable, and high-performance TP.  It might be fine for sending an
>order or invoice now and then, but sustained throughput of the sort
>I think of as "high" performance is likely never going to be accomplished
>with session-oriented architectures.
>
>For a good overview of TP design, see Jim Gray's book, "Transaction Processing:
>Concepts and Techniques".
>
>P.S. AFAIK the first CRS systems of any note came into being in the 1970s not
>      the 1960s, but I may be incorrect in the matter.
>-- 
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Tim Daneliuk     tundra at tundraware.com
>PGP Key:         http://www.tundraware.com/PGP/




My recollection is that online reservations were in use ca. 1970, and I
know that the operating system was called ACP, renamed to TPF.
Googleing for that finds that online reservation systems stared in the
50's and ran on 7000 gear in the 60's.  

http://www.blackbeard.com/tpf/Sabre_off_TPF/some_highlights_from_sabre_history.htm

I was in banking in th 80's. I recall that circa 1990 hitting 1000 DB
trans/sec was the holy grail on a million $ mainframe.  My bank bought
what was called "the last TPF sale" about 1991.  It was used as a
"message router" to conect transactions from thousands ATMs and
teller stations to the right backend system necessary to make a bank
merger work.  


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