[Twisted-Python] http server performance

bharath venkatesh bharathv6.project at gmail.com
Tue Mar 4 09:41:08 EST 2008


hi,
       my project involves lot of  I/O  over the network.. one part of my
project involves a server(http) which is listening on the port for many
client . this sever fetches an image from the web and  and send it to
clients ....  and many clients will request the server concurrently .. to
implement concurrent serving to clients i used threaded http server
like this

class HTTPServer(SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn,BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServer):
     pass

class RequestHandler(BaseHTTPServer.BaseHTTPRequestHandler):
      def do_GET(self):
         print "received connection from: ",self.client_address
         image=image_retreive()   #where image retreive is a function that
retrieves image from the web and works fine
         self.send_response(200)
         self.send_header("Content-type",format)
         self.send_header("Content-Length",len(image_data))
         self.end_headers()
         self.request.sendall(image_data)

httpd = HTTPServer(('',port_number), RequestHandler)
httpd.serve_forever()


this code worked fine but this performance was very bad ... it workes fine
if the clients requested for small n medium size images as the server sends
the response immediately and also workes fine if one client is requesting a
large image (obviously server takes time to send response  as  it takes time
to fetch the image from the web ) and other clients concurrently request for
small and medium images  these  clients will  be served immediately even if
the other client is waiting but problem crops up when 2 clients concurrently
request for an large image .. while these  two clients are waiting for the
response fromthe server . The server doesn't accept any other client request
... i can see this as i am printing the  address of the client that connects
with server   in the 1st line of get method  of the request handler if two
clients concurrently request for an large image and only two clients address
gets printed  that means only 2 clients receives connection to the server
even if  other clients  are requesting  the server at the same time and
other servers are served only after the  those 2 server releases the
connection or get the response . that means server servers only 2 clients at
a time .this is very undesirable as even if 3rd client is requesting for
very small image and 2 clients are waiting for large image .. 3rd client
won't receive the response until those 2 clients are  served . to make thing
worst my server should serve 10 to 15 clients concurrently

to solve this i did some searching and found about cherrypy and twisted also
implemented my server in cherrypy
like this

from cherrypy import wsgiserver
def image_httpserver_app(environ, start_response):
    print >>sys.stdout,"received connection from: (%s : %s ) \nthe image url
is: %s " %
(environ["REMOTE_ADDR"],environ["REMOTE_PORT"],environ["QUERY_STRING"])
    status = '200 OK'
    response_headers = [('Content-type',format)]
     image=image_retreive()
     response_headers = [("Content-Length",`len(image_data)`)]
     start_response(status, response_headers)
     return [image_data]

mappings=[('/', image_httpserver_app)]
wsgi_apps = mappings
server = wsgiserver.CherryPyWSGIServer(('localhost', 8888), wsgi_apps,

server_name='localhost',numthreads=20)

if __name__ == '__main__':
      try:
          server.start()
      except KeyboardInterrupt:
          server.stop()

this didn't solve the problem at all .. same thing is happening only 2
clients is served at a time ..even if no of threads is assigned  to 20 ..
i have did lot of searching and reading .. and hoping to find a solution
..can anyone make it easier for me
i have heard of twisted deffered object .. will it solved the problem ? if
not pls suggest me alternative..
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