[Twisted-Python] Multi-reactor architecture

Reza Lotun rlotun at gmail.com
Fri Nov 13 12:44:45 EST 2009


> thank you for such detailed response.
> I feel, finally I've succeed to express my original question correctly.
>
> So if I go one step forward, and lets assume that indeed there is such
> limit of concurrent connections, THAN:
> should it be resolved by another architecture or another usage type of
> Twisted technology or something else?

Again, I don't think there are any universal answers to this question.
It depends on what you're building. For example, say it's a REST api,
which by design is stateless (i.e. no sessions). Then you can stick a
load balancer in front (if you're on EC2 amazon has an "elastic load
balancer" service for this) and load balance amongst many machines. As
you find traffic increases you simply add more machines. This is
called "horizontal scalability" and, as you might imagine, its highly
desirable.

Another form is "vertical scalability" - that involves getting a
faster computer to run your server on. This might work for some cases,
but not in general - it seems to be the method applied to scaling
RDBMSs, before going down the road of master/slave setups, sharding
and denormalization.

Of course, you *could* use a different technology entirely when you
need to scale really high. This might make sense if your'e a small
company and growing - say you start out as a small team, and you need
something up quickly that's fairly decent. You happen to know python
so you roll the whole thing out in Twisted. As time progresses, you
may rewrite certain systems in, say, erlang or something and move
forward.

So, it's hard to say, really. At least, I'd like to know myself ;-)
That's what makes the wheel field so interesting - there's a certain
creative element to scalable systems.

Cheers,
Reza

-- 
Reza Lotun
mobile: +44 (0)7521 310 763
email:  rlotun at gmail.com
work:   reza at tweetdeck.com
twitter: @rlotun



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