[Zope-dev] Will ZServer help me in this scenario?

[skip@mojam.com (Skip Montanaro)]

Glad to see this list has been created.

I am currently using ZopeHTTPServer in the following architecture:

    Apache <-----> ZopeHTTPServer <-----> Musi-Cal DB
            HTTP                  XML-RPC

Some requests from the net (searches) require a full round-trip to the
database.  Other things, like displaying an otherwise static DTML page,
don't.  The problem is that the ZopeHTTPServer is single-threaded at the
moment, so if a search takes a long time (say, a couple seconds), simple
stuff like calling a DTML template (which might execute in a tenth of a
second), block.  This, of course, causes Apache to get its britches in a
twist and lots of its child processes start to pile up, memory gets short,
yadda, yadda, yadda.  I've had some trouble with deadlocks when trying to
run ZHS multi-threaded (probably missed some object that needed to be
locked).

Will running ZServer with its asyncore/asynchat modules help alleviate this
problem?  Will I need to make changes to Fredrik Lundh's XML-RPC code to
make this work?  (XML-RPC is a given at this point.  We're calling
Musi-Cal's database from both Python and Perl at this point and it works
great.)  How stable is the ZServer alpha release?  If it's mostly the FTP
and PCGI support that is still experimental, I can live with that since I
don't use either one.

Thanks,

Skip Montanaro	| Mojam: "Uniting the World of Music" http://www.mojam.com/
skip@mojam.com  | Musi-Cal: http://www.musi-cal.com/
518-372-5583