[Web-SIG] My summary of a web-platform Open-Space discussion at PyCon 2007

[Ian Bicking]

Chad Whitacre wrote:
> Jim,
> 
>  > I'll summarize my recollections of a very useful discussion
>  > that several of us had at PyCon 2007.
> 
> Looks accurate to me, thanks.
> 
> 
>  > - Ian will lead a server benchmark effort
> 
> Where by "server," we mean core HTTP server library, yes?

Yes, cherrypy.wsgiserver, paste.httpserver, twisted.web2, flup, etc.

At openplans we (well, Luke) did some performance testing, in our case 
of an intermediary we're writing.  The same basic pattern should fit 
this.  I wrote a couple WSGI apps for that that showed particular kinds 
of behavior.  I guess all I really did was an application that 
periodically was really slow.  Another interesting case would be an 
application that yielded content very slowly.  Different combinations of 
app_iter and start_response writer could be interesting.  And of course 
the simplest example (which is usually all people do) of a trivial 
application that just serves up a single short string.  Oh, and I should 
do one that serves up a large string, in one chunk and many chunks.

Personally my own interest is in servers that act well even when the 
apps act poorly, more than the single case of a fast server with a 
perfect and fast application behind it.  The perfect app is easy to 
test, so it'll be in there too of course, but just one of many.

I think most of the work will be in setting up httperf with some scripts 
to invoke it and the other server.  The other stuff can already be glued 
together quite easily by Paste Deploy.  Well, not counting some of the 
servers that are harder to put together, like Apache+flup/fastcgi (or 
another server there), or mod_python generally.  I suppose I'll just 
write up some simple httpd.conf's for these cases, and I guess I can 
fire it off from a script easily enough.  Well, I'll probably look to 
someone else to do mod_python (and mod_wsgi before long), since I'm bad 
at setting those up.  Once Apache+flup is setup, Apache+mod_python would 
probably be easy for someone who knows there way around.


-- 
Ian Bicking | ianb at colorstudy.com | http://blog.ianbicking.org