[Web-SIG] A query for hosting providers
Remi Delon
remi at cherrypy.org
Tue Mar 29 11:43:55 CEST 2005
> I'm wondering -- and this is mostly directed to the hosting providers
> (Remi, Sean...) -- what are the problems with providing commodity-level
> hosting for Python programs? I can think of some, but I'm curious what
> you've encountered and if you have ideas about how to improve things.
>
> Some things I've thought about:
> * Long running processes are hard to maintain (assuming we rule out
> CGI). Code becomes stale, maybe the server process gets in a bad state.
> Sometimes processes becomes wedged. With mod_python this can effect
> the entire site.
Yes, maintaining long-running processes can be a pain, but that's not
related to python itself, it's true regardless of the language that was
used to write the program.
> * Isolating clients from each other can be difficult. For mod_python
> I'm assuming each client needs their own Apache server.
Yes, that's how we ended up setting up our mod_python accounts.
We also found stability problems in some of the other mod_* modules
(mod_webkit, mod_skunkweb, ...) and they sometimes crashed the main
Apache server (very bad). So for all the frameworks that support a
standalone HTTP server mode (CherryPy, Webware, Skunkweb, ...) we now
set them up as standalone HTTP server listening on a local port, and we
just use our main Apache server as a proxy to these servers.
This allows us to use the trick described on this page:
http://www.cherrypy.org/wiki/BehindApache (look for "autostart.cgi") to
have Apache restart the server automatically if it ever goes down.
> Maybe this
> isn't as much of a problem these days, as virtualizing technologies have
> improved, and multiple Apache processes isn't that big of a deal.
> * Setup of frameworks is all over the place. Setting up multiple
> frameworks might be even more difficult. Some of them may depend on
> mod_rewrite. Server processes are all over the place as well.
>
> But I don't have a real feeling for how to solve these, and I'm sure
> there's things I'm not thinking about.
Well, the 2 main problems that I can think of are:
- Python frameworks tend to work as long-running processes, which
have a lot of advantages for your site, but are a nightmare for hosting
providers. There are soooo many things to watch for: CPU usage (a
process can start "spinning"), RAM usage, process crashing, ... But that
is not related to python and any hosting provider that supports
long-running processes face the same challenge. For instance, we support
Tomcat and the problems are the same. For this we ended up writing a lot
of custom monitoring scripts on our own (we couldn't find exactly what
we needed out there). Fortunately, python makes it easy to write these
scripts :-)
- But another challenge (and this one is more specific to Python)
is the number of python versions and third party modules that we have to
support. For instance, at Python-Hosting.com, we have to support all 4
versions of python: 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4, and all of them are being
used by various people. And for each version, we usually have 10 to 20
third-party modules (mysql-python, psycopg, elementtree, sqlobject, ...)
that people need ! We run Red Hat Enterprise 3, but RPMs for python are
not designed to work with multiple python versions installed, and RPMs
for third-party modules are usually inexistent. As a result, we have to
build all the python-related stuff from source. And some of these
modules are sometimes hard to build (the python-subversion bindings for
instance) and you can run into some library-version-compatibility
nightmare. And as if this wasn't enough, new releases of modules come
out everyday ...
I think that this second point is the main challenge and any hosting
provider that is not specialized in python doesn't have the time or the
knowledge to build and maintain all these python versions and
third-party modules. Of course, they could just say "we're going to
support this specific python version with these few third-party modules
and that's it", but experience shows that most people need at least one
or 2 "uncommon" third-party modules for their site so if that module is
missing they just can't run their site ...
But above all, I think that the main reason why python frameworks are
not more commonly supported by the big hosting providers is because the
market for these frameworks is very small (apart from Zope/Plone). For
all the "smaller" frameworks (CherryPy, Webware, SkunkWeb, Quixote, ...)
we host less than 50 of each, so the big hosting providers simply won't
bother learning these frameworks and supporting them for such a small
market.
--
Remi / http://www.python-hosting.com
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