Smolt deployment

[Luke Macken]

On Sat, Mar 03, 2007 at 05:31:07PM -0500, seth vidal wrote:
> How performant is the tg server? In the past the python webserver was
> not exactly a barn burner when it came to performance. It worked, but it
> didn't hold up well under heavy load. Having apache in front helps but
> just like with zope, if the app is slow, the app is slow.
> 
> any load testing done, yet?

AFAIK, no load testing has been done with our TurboGears apps, but I'm
definitely in favor of doing it before F7.  I recall kim0 and paulobanon
did some load tests in the past, but I haven't seen the results yet.
Does anyone recommend any load generation tools?

A presentation was given at this years PyCon called "Scaling Python for
High-Load Web Sites"[0], I definitely recommend checking it out.

I recommend that we load balance dynamic page requests from our proxy
servers to our application servers, and let the proxies serve out cached
static content.  We definitely want to hide hide CherryPy behind apache,
because having HTTP/1.1 and SSL support is nice, among many other
benefits.  Whether or not we use mod_{python,proxy,rewrite} to connect to
CherryPy is up for discussion.  mod_python is the fastest option, and the
only downfall really is that it is harder to configure, and that you have to
restart Apache every time you cange your CherryPy code.  I give a +1 for
mod_python, at least until WSGI support in CherryPy solidifies.

Since each application server will have its own connection pool with the
db servers, increasing our scalability will simply consist of adding
another Xen guest behind our load balancer.

So from here we might want to look into creating a standard guest image optimized
for our TurboGears Xen guests.  publictest2 was running FC6 (it still might be,
but as far as I can tell it seems to be down), and I'm not sure what our
other TG systems are running, but I think we should be consistent.  I tend to
lean towards RHEL{5,4}, which will help us get TurboGears & friends whipped into
shape for EPEL 

What do you all think?

luke

[0]: http://www.polimetrix.com/pycon/slides/