[medusa] Medusa/Bobo nonblocking?

[eugene.leitl@l...]

Sam Rushing wrote:

> Depends on the nature of you CGI scripts. If they are taking a long time
> because they're doing work that would cause a non-blocking process to block
> for long periods of time (say, long SQL queries), then you either won't get

Yeah, they're doing a database search, and producing a tree of .png images
plus a few user controls mapped to a <table> (actually, they'll be producing
a piece of XML which is rendered by another (socket-decoupled) piece of code). 
Alternatively, this is going to be one big .png image with server-side 
clickable maps (would require a web server which understand clickable maps,
the Tk tree widget and maintaining a list of clickable rectangles plus be 
heavy on bandwidth use for dialup users, though).

> any advantage, or you'll have to rewrite your cgi to be event-driven.

Care to outline the principle, or provide a pointer? No problem if you
don't have the time nor the inclination, "event-driven" and "cgi" plugged
into Google will eventually come up with something (so far, with surprisingly
little, though).

> Another approach to this is to use an async http server like squid as a

Uh, I'd rather stay with something with a small footprint (a few pages of code)
and Python or ANSI C.

> reverse proxy. (check out http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/stans/slashdot.html for
> an explanation of this setup)