Re: [Chicken-users] rails-like framework

[Peter Busser]

On Sun, Apr 23, 2006 at 12:29:01AM -0500, Alex Shinn wrote:
> At Sat, 22 Apr 2006 19:30:22 +0200, Peter Busser wrote:
> > 
> > On Sat, Apr 22, 2006 at 10:15:26AM -0700, Shawn Rutledge wrote:
> > > On 4/22/06, Peter Busser <address@hidden> wrote:
> > > > For instance, in many companies, it is mandatory to use something like
> > > > Apache. It would be useful if this framework would work with the SCGI 
> > > > egg,
> > > > so it can be integrated with Apache through the mod-scgi module for 
> > > > Apache.
> > > Has anybody benchmarked Apache vs. Spiffy?  (Hopefully a compiled
> > > spiffy to get the best results, and only static html for the test.)
> > 
> > Not me. But I bet that Apache is much faster than Spiffy with static
> > content, because I think it uses system specific optimisations like e.g.
> > sendfile(). Apache is likely to scale better too.
> 
> What does "scale better" mean?

It means that it won't slow down faster than the load increases.

> Apache 1.x uses multi-processes, which
> are severely limited, and Apache 2.x uses POSIX threads, which are
> still very heavy compared to the lightweight threads Spiffy uses.

Agreed. But threads are just one thing, there is more to a web server
than just threads.

> In
> this sense, Spiffy is closer to Yaws (http://yaws.hyber.org), a
> webserver written in Erlang, and in the following benchmark Yaws is
> shown to completely outscale Apache 2.0, handling over 80,000 requests
> compared to Apache's 4000:
> 
>   http://www.sics.se/~joe/apachevsyaws.html

Sounds good, except that Yaws is not Spiffy and Erlang is not Chicken.
However, it would certainly be interesting to see the same benchmark performed
on Spiffy.

> For Ajax sites, small dynamic requests are the norm and this
> scalability is essential.

Except that Ajax is not the kind of static HTML content Shawn was talking
about.

> P.S. sendfile(2) would be very easy to add to Spiffy for those
> interested.

True. Fact is, Spiffy does not use it right now. Therefore it has to
read/write every bit of the content. Which is slow. I don't think the
threading makes up for this in the case of static content (especially
not if we're talking about large files, like ISO images).

> P.P.S. you can always use Spiffy along with Apache via mod_proxy and
> mod_rewrite.  synthcode.com runs on a Scheme webserver on the same
> machine as several friends who all use Apache (and, sadly, rails).

Sure you can do that. But that is not going to make Spiffy faster than
Apache.

Nor does it make it a good idea to put everything in Spiffy. I mean, the
generation of code depending on the database layout (if I understand
correctly, that is the main advantage of Rails) could be useful for
stand-alone application development too. Why should it be limited to only
web-site development? Or to only one web-server? There is no need to
unnecessarily limit its usefulness.

Just my 2 Eurocents.

Groetjes,
Peter.