[Twisted-web] load balancing and performance

[Andrea Arcangeli]

On Sat, Jan 29, 2005 at 08:24:49PM -0500, James Y Knight wrote:
> On Jan 29, 2005, at 7:26 PM, Valentino Volonghi aka Dialtone wrote:
> >>Perhaps I'm going with wrong priorities though, the major offender is
> >>compy, compy must be dropped from Nevow ASAP :). Leaving it as a
> >
> >compy is not going away :).
> 
> dp also stated this at one point on IRC. I didn't have time to discuss 
> it at that point, but I think it ought to be discussed. Why does nevow 
> need/want its own components API, that is either 1) is a fork that is 
> nearly identical to the old twisted API (when running on Tw 1.3), or 2) 
> uses the old twisted API compatibility layer (when running on Tw 2.0). 
> Twisted has successfully disposed of its components API, for several 
> good reasons. What purpose does it serve to continue the life of that 
> code in Nevow?

I definitely agree with you, there's no point in duplicating this code
except to risk having more bugs and risk not merging optimizations from
the other duplicate forks. Let's not fall in love with compy if that
means duplicating efforts.

> As far as I'm concerned, the appropriate course of action is to convert 
> everything to use the zope interface API.

Yep. And if it's still *that* slow, then we should rewrite
*zope.interfaces* (not compy) with pyrex. what's the point of writing
compy with pyrex and leaving zope.interfaces dogslow? We should do that
once for all if we do it.

Leaving compy as a pure "API-forwarder", so old code doesn't break may
even be ok of course, but it should not try to duplicate anything that
is already available in zope.interfaces.

But still I'm sceptical about the computational complexity of the compy
stuff, so I believe that should be evaluated before going in C.

> >Writing a compy2 speedup in Pyrex will help and will probably also be 
> >faster than zope.interface since it will be a lot smaller.
> 
> Now not only are we keeping the old code, but heavily rewriting it? I 
> have my doubts about those speed benefits, too...

Agreed.