scaling problems

[Reid Priedhorsky]

On Tue, 20 May 2008 10:47:50 +1000, James A. Donald wrote:
>
> 1.  Looks to me that python will not scale to very large programs,
> partly because of the lack of static typing, but mostly because there
> is no distinction between creating a new variable and utilizing an
> existing variable, so the interpreter fails to catch typos and name
> collisions.  I am inclined to suspect that when a successful small
> python program turns into a large python program, it rapidly reaches
> ninety percent complete, and remains ninety percent complete forever.

I find this frustrating too, but not to the extent that I choose a
different language. pylint helps but it's not as good as a nice, strict
compiler.

> 2.  It is not clear to me how a python web application scales.  Python
> is inherently single threaded, so one will need lots of python
> processes on lots of computers, with the database software handling
> parallel accesses to the same or related data.  One could organize it
> as one python program for each url, and one python process for each
> http request, but that involves a lot of overhead starting up and
> shutting down python processes.  Or one could organize it as one
> python program for each url, but if one gets a lot of http requests
> for one url, a small number of python processes will each sequentially
> handle a large number of those requests.  What I am really asking is:
> Are there python web frameworks that scale with hardware and how do
> they handle scaling?

This sounds like a good match for Apache with mod_python.

Reid