On Jul 08, 2015, at 05:13 PM, Eric Searcy wrote:

Testing with siege (15 concurrent users) on a production VM, I get 29 requests/sec and a concurrency of just 1.3x requesting the "/3.0/domains" URL. For "/3.0/system/versions" I get only about 0.2x concurrency. This may not scale too well to a very active Postorius, especially if 1 Postorious request results in many Mailman API requests.

Is anyone using anything besides wsgiref for the REST interface? (uwsgi, gunicorn, ?) I thought I could get some extra performance that way...

You're probably the first person to experiment with this, so please let us know how it goes. If you get one of the alternative wsgi servers working and it improves things, please do contribute some documentation. I'd definitely like for this to be a viable option. wsgiref is there because it's all stdlib.

Cheers, -Barry

On Jul 10, 2015, at 10:47 AM, Andrew Stuart wrote:

Correct me if I’m wrong but effectively gunicorn would need to run the rest server within itself, so it would be necessary to run the rest server outside the mailman runners? I’m not sure how to do so.

Most of the RESTRunner is probably not applicable to the gunicorn case. Runners themselves are forked from the master watcher, so the warnings about threads is there solely because we have to run the .server_forever() call in a separate thread within the rest runner process, otherwise the main thread will block and we won't be able to use the Runner infrastructure to kill it when mailman stop is issued.

# Both the REST server and the signal handlers must run in the main # thread; the former because of SQLite requirements (objects created # in one thread cannot be shared with the other threads), and the # latter because of Python's signal handling semantics.

I'm honestly not sure that SQLite restriction is applicable any more, at least for this particular case. Maybe it was once when we were using Storm. But I think it's generally acknowledged that production systems should probably be backed by a client/server database, although SQLite may work fine for smaller sites.

rest/wsgiapp.py also has the following function which seems to be the right wsgi app function to pass into gunicorn. I couldn’t find the right incantation to get it to run standlone.

def make_application(): """Create the WSGI application.

Use this if you want to integrate Mailman's REST server with your own WSGI server. """ return RootedAPI(Root())

The intention is that this would work; what problems have you seen?

My thinking is that a gunicorn -or other external wsgi server- based REST runner wouldn't do much more than run gunicorn with the proper commands in a subprocess, and manage its PID so that the runner itself could response to mailman stop and restart commands.

If that works, I could see adding runner subclasses to runners/rest.py such that a site could change [runner.rest]class in their mailman.cfg file to select say the gunicorn based REST server over the default wsgiref one.

Cheers, -Barry

On 7/10/15 11:16 AM, Barry Warsaw wrote:

On Jul 10, 2015, at 10:43 AM, Barry Warsaw wrote:

...

My thinking is that a gunicorn -or other external wsgi server- based REST runner wouldn't do much more than run gunicorn with the proper commands in a subprocess, and manage its PID so that the runner itself could response to mailman stop and restart commands.

I took a slightly different approach. Basically don't start gunicorn with mailman start but start it in a shell after the main system is up and running. Here's a very experimental and almost completely untested branch that could get you started:

https://gitlab.com/warsaw/mailman/tree/gunicorn

Read the docstring in this commit for details.

https://gitlab.com/warsaw/mailman/commit/3fbfde8793c9c5bf12b0f250a58b3e3134f...

This didn't work for me without modification, both because gunicorn was trying to pass 2 arguments into make_application, and because the initialization was trying to happen each request, which caused issues (mailman crashing trying to add the same language twice).

Here's how I resolved it (API running under gunicorn 19.3.0 correctly responds to requests; didn't test much beyond that):

https://gitlab.com/emsearcy/mailman/commit/33fa949cfa190d32e3fd68ed02e787cc0...

It's curious to me that Mailman Bundler makes references to Gunicorn support, but it seems there code would run into the same problems I did (multiple initiations and argument count mismatch). Is anybody using this from Bundler currently and can help me figure out why the difference?

https://mailman-bundler.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman-bundler/blob/master/mailman_web/wsgi.py https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman-bundler/blob/master/templates/deployment/...

Best regards,

Eric