scaling problems

[Duncan Booth]

Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch <bj_666 at gmx.net> wrote:

> On Tue, 20 May 2008 10:47:50 +1000, James A. Donald wrote:
> 
>> 2.  It is not clear to me how a python web application scales.
> 
> Ask YouTube.  :-)

Or look at Google appengine where unlike normal Python you really are 
prevented from making good use of threading.

Google App Engine takes an interesting approach by forcing the programmer 
to consider scalability right from the start: state is stored in a 
distributed database which cannot do all the hard to scale things that SQL 
databases do. This means that you have to work as though your application 
were spread on servers all round the world from day 1 instead of waiting 
until the structure that was 'good enough' is threatening to kill your 
business before you address them.

It also puts strict limits on how much a single web request can do, so 
again you have to work from day 1 to make sure that page requests are as 
efficient as possible.

In return you get an application which should scale well. There is nothing 
Python specific about the techniques, it is just that Python is the first 
(and so far only) language supported on the platform.

-- 
Duncan Booth http://kupuguy.blogspot.com