XMLRPC Server

[Brian Quinlan]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> well, if you're talking pure CGI, you need to start the interpreter, 
> import the required modules, connect to the database, unmarshal the 
> xml-rpc request, talk to the database, marshal the response, and shut 
> down, in less than 30 milliseconds.
> 
> just importing the CGI module (or the database module) can take longer 
> than that...

The original performance specification was "...receive up to 2000 calls 
per minute". I don't believe that means that a call has to be serviced 
in under 30ms (wall-clock time) but total CPU time would have to be 
<30ms in order to not fall behind under a constant 2000 requests/second 
load. So we can probably remove database connection and communication 
time (i.e. IO-bound components). Still, it's a lot tighter than I though 
it would be:

% time python -c "import SimpleXMLRPCServer; import MySQLdb"

real 0m0.144s
user 0m0.046s
sys  0m0.064s

So it's already almost 4x too slow. But I'm running this on Ubuntu, 
running on VMWare on my 1.6GHz Pentium-M laptop. I would assume that a 
beefy server would do a lot better.

Cheers,
Brian