[Moin-user] inexplicably(?) slow with CGI on Mac OS X

[greg]

Hi all,

I'm putting MoinMoin on a Mac OS X server and it's running very
slowly.  It felt an order of magnitude slower than I expected and
these benchmarks confirm it

I ran "ab -c 10 -n 100 http://localhost/mywiki/WhyWikiWorks"

Machine 1:  (Machine it needs to run on)
    Mac 800Mhz G4 and 512MB
    Mac OS X  10.3.7
    apache 1.3.33
    python 2.3
    MoinMoin 1.3.4 (using CGI)
    requests per second 0.34
    90% served in 31367 msec

Machine 2:  (Home machine)
    Compaq with  Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) and 512MB
    Xandros 2.0 (debian linux)
    apache 1.3.27
    python 2.3
    MoinMoin 1.3.4 (using CGI)
    requests per second 3.16
    90% served in 3199 msec

Is hardware enough to explain an order of magnitude difference?  On
machine 1 the load goes to ~10 with 10 simultaneous connections and on
top you can see all the "python"'s bouncing between 5 and 10%, so it
appears CPU bound.  I understand I can get a significant speedup (5-10
time?) with mod_python, but this appears to be very slow to start
with.  Does 0.34 request per second seem reasonable for a 800 MHz G4
with this configuration?

Thanks,
Greg