Webware performance

I was recently asked in an email my thoughts about Webware's performance. Figured I'd share them here as well.

So far I've been entirely satisfied with the performance and stability of Webware. Running on my dual 1.25Ghz G4 desktop it serves data out of Syncato's cache at roughly 45% of static HTML speed. That's really not too bad given it's a dynamic request and is traversing a socket from Apache. It serves roughly 110 requests per second which is a 9.5 million requests per day pace. My production server is considerably slower since it's about 6 years old, but Webware is anything but the bottleneck in the system.

The one potential problem with Webware is really a problem with Python in general and that's the global interpreter lock in the Python interpreter. That will serialize certain operations that could be more efficient if run in parallel, especially when you have multiple CPUs. This would maybe be a problem if you were to actually try to push 9.5 million requests on a single machine. Fortunately 99.9% of sites don't get anywhere near that and if you do you should definitely have more then one machine anyway. My modest little site doesn't even begin to tap into that.

Posted by Kimbro Staken