ActivePython/IIS Request Concurrency

[Erik Rose]

It seems that the combination of ActivePython, ASP, and IIS is incapable 
of processing multiple HTTP requests at a time. Am I insane? Is this, 
perhaps, a configuration issue on my end?

Here's the test code that brought me to this conclusion:

<%@ Language = Python %>
<%
def slow():
     for i in range(100000):
         j = i * i;
     return 'Wow, that took forever!!!';

Response.write(slow());
%>

I dumped the above into a file called slow.asp, yielding a page that 
takes about 7 seconds to load. When I load slow.asp in two browser 
windows approximately simultaneously, one of them loads 7 seconds after 
the other. If they were running concurrently, I would expect them to 
both load almost simultaneously, after about 14 seconds. I got the same 
results using a time.sleep(10) call instead of the above CPU-heavy loop. 
Incidentally, a similar test with ActivePerl yields the same results.

If this limitation is real, it seems to me that this setup is entirely 
unsuitable for production work, since any page that makes a long-running 
DB query brings all other request processing to a halt. This would 
surprise me, though, given the high profile of ActiveState's products in 
the IIS community. Can anybody give me some good news here? I'm striving 
valiantly to free my project from the clutches of VBScript but have been 
thus far foiled. :-)

Hopefully,
Erik Rose
Programmer/Analyst
Pennsylvania State University