help! advocacy resources needed fast

Skip Montanaro skip at pobox.com
Wed Mar 5 13:35:30 EST 2003


    Geoff> The bottleneck is in Zope; some portion of this could be blamed
    Geoff> on the dynamic nature and complexity of our pages, but some
    Geoff> portion is pushing DTML through a Python parser on every request.

Have you tried Zope Page Templates (ZPT)?  Are they faster or slower than
DTML?

    Geoff> We have spent a year refactoring key components, and building
    Geoff> caching solutions to minimize the impact of load. We're still
    Geoff> having some problems, and the problems look to increase.

What sort of caching do you do?  Squid or Apache, or something wedged into
Zope?

    Geoff> The guy who's pushing Java, he's got a nice easy answer, because
    Geoff> Sun's marketing budget makes his case for him. I have a harder
    Geoff> time: anecdotal evidence about increase in programmer
    Geoff> productivity, short turnaround times, shallow learning curve.

Are those advantages touted for Java as well?  System performance or not,
your management isn't probably going to be happy trading off a 2-10x
performance boost for a 2-10x reduction in productivity. ;-)

    Geoff> And when it comes right down to it, we need examples of sites
    Geoff> doing the same kind of highly-dynamic, high-volume business we're
    Geoff> doing, in some python toolkit, and succeeding.

Check out the Twisted success stories:

    http://www.twistedmatrix.com/services/success

Sam Rushing mentions "long-running, high performance network servers" on the
Medusa page, and goes on to say:

    Medusa is un use now in several mission-critical applications, ranging
    from custom web servers at extremely high-traffic sites to distributed
    data processing systems.

Check here:

    http://www.nightmare.com/medusa/index.html

Perhaps Sam can give you more details behind his statements.  My guess is
that since Andrew Kuchling has taken over some/all the maintenance of Medusa
that Quixote also uses it.  You might check here:

    http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/quixote/

    Geoff> As dire as I've made things look, every engineer who touches the
    Geoff> Python code, wants to work in Python. We like Python, we're good
    Geoff> at Python, and Python has proven to be our engineering
    Geoff> department's competitive advantage. So, it's not like I'm
    Geoff> standing out there alone.  It's just that I'm the guy nominated
    Geoff> most likely to come up with an architecture we could live with.

If you know it's DTML and ZPT is faster, perhaps you can get enough
performance boost by switching heavily accessed pages to ZPT, giving
yourself a bit more breathing room.

Skip






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