Python 3K or Python 2.9?

[Graham Dumpleton]

On Sep 12, 2:14 pm, Ben Finney <bignose+hates-s... at benfinney.id.au>
wrote:
> Paul Rubin <http://phr...@NOSPAM.invalid> writes:
> > TheFlyingDutchman <zzbba... at aol.com> writes:
> > > Python user and advocate Bruce Eckel is disappointed with the
> > > additions (or lack of additions) in Python 3:
>
> > >http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=214112
>
> > That article is pretty weak.
>
> It is responded to by Guido here:
>
>    "A Response to Bruce Eckel"
>     <URL:http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=214325>

In that blog, Guido says:

"""Concurrency: It seems we're now happily out exploring here. I'm
looking forward to benchmarks showing that PP or similar (or
dissimilar!) solutions actually provide a performance gain. Another
route I'd like to see explored is integrating one such solution into
an existing web framework (or perhaps as WSGI middleware) so that web
applications have an easy way out without redesigning their
architecture."""

Maybe I don't fully understand where Guido is coming from, but
solutions for spreading web applications across multiple processes
have been available for a long time in solutions such as mod_python
and mod_fastcgi. With a view to improving further on these solutions
mod_wsgi has also been created.

All these solutions either use the multi process nature of the web
server, or themselves use multiple daemon processes to which requests
are distributed by Apache. End result is that one can make better use
of multi processor or multi core machines. Also, when using multi
threaded Apache worker MPM, because a lot of stuff is not even done in
Python code, such as static file serving, multiple cores can even be
used within the same process. Thus, in the larger context of how
Apache is implemented and what web applications provide, the GIL isn't
as big a problem as some like to believe it is as far as preventing
proper utilisation of the machines resources.

FWIW, I have blogged my own response to Guido's comment above at:

http://blog.dscpl.com.au/2007/09/parallel-python-discussion-and-modwsgi.html

Now over the years I have seen a lot of Python developers showing
quite a dislike for using Python integrated with Apache. As a result
the last thing people seem to want to do is fix such solutions up and
make them work better. Reality is though that unless a very good
solution for hosting Python with Apache comes up, you will probably
never see good cheap commodity web hosting for Python. Older solutions
simply aren't safe to use or are hard to set up and manage.

Creating lots of distinct Python processes and proxying to them, like
the purists would like to see, simply isn't going to happen as such
setups are too hard to manage and use up too much resources on a large
scale. Web hosting companies want something simple which they can
integrate into their existing PHP focused Apache installations and
which don't chew up huge amounts of additional resources, thereby
forcing a reduction in their site densities. To that end, we still
have a way to go.

An older blog entry of mine where I have covered these problems is:

http://blog.dscpl.com.au/2007/07/commodity-shared-hosting-and-modwsgi.html

Graham