best apache+python module?
Cameron Laird
claird at starbase.neosoft.com
Fri Jul 28 12:10:47 EDT 2000
In article <see-9D8864.22245327072000 at news.dnai.com>,
Sam Penrose <see at message.body> wrote:
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>After having a Bad Experience with one of these (memory leak in
>PyApache), I must ask why they are so popular. My company writes
>pure-Python sites whose CGIs handle tens of thousands of hits a day on
>unremarkable Intel hardware running vanilla Linux. Two of our CGIs have
>started to bog down recently, and in both cases the cause is the same:
>have to generate HTML pages roughly a meg in size; one containing so
>many images that the number of Apache processes goes through the roof.
>In neither case would faster Python performance help.
>
>Linking your interpreter to Apache forces you into dependence on a chunk
>of code that has orders of magnitude less testing than either Apache or
>Python does, probably wouldn't remove any bottlenecks if they existed,
>and may well break the next time either Python or Apache is updated.
>
>Unless, of course, you know differently. But my sense is that most of
>the people interested in these modules merely know they want their sites
>to run fast and have read the mod_perl marketing materials.
>
>Anyone who can afford 256 megs of RAM and a SCSI hard drive can serve
>thousands of people a day with sites that execute thousands of lines of
>Python, without working particularly hard to optimize their software
>(CGIs or Python or the OS). And if they find they can't, they should not
>assume that a persistent Python executable will help without having good
>reason to do so.
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Sooooooooooooooo true. I hope a lot of people see
your posting.
As it turns out, I do a lot of work with these em-
bedded extensions (mostly in languages other than
Python, but with Python, also). My primary motiva-
tion is at the software engineering level: I find
"microscripting" (executable content embedded in
HTML) far, far more pleasant in general to develop
and maintain than CGI.
The big performance gain I most often see from the
mod_*-like embedded extensions has to do with per-
sistent database connections. Saving the costs of
building up and breaking *those* down can be a big
win. Language stuff is an incidental.
People have put a lot of energy into making Apache
extensible, shaking down the mod_*()-s, and so on.
I enjoy using them. I agree, though, that they
need to be watched carefully. Memory leakiness is
only one of the frailties to which they're prone.
--
Cameron Laird <claird at NeoSoft.com>
Business: http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal: http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html
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