Need to get more involved in Web SIG (was Re: [Zope3-dev] Fixing ZServer bugs?)

[Jim Fulton]

Christian Theune wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was able to reproduce http://www.zope.org/Collectors/Zope3-dev/714 today.
> 
> We have a patch from the reporter without and I don't see why the
> current tests fail to catch this behavior in the first place.
> 
> Did we ever drop support for ZServer? The changelog reads 'replaced
> ZServer with twisted' which sounds very much like ZServer was defined
> obsolete. (And wasn't the goal that we don't have to take care for
> network servers anymore anyway?)

I'm not certain that we're actively supporting either server.

Currently, the Zope project has 3 servers, the Zope 2 ZServer,
the Zope 3 ZServer, which is afaik unrelated to the Zope 2 ZServer,
and Twisted. (I count Twisted as one of our servers because we've
put significant effort into integrating Twisted and seem to be
maintaining the WSGI integration that we're using.)

I think only Michael Kerrin actively supports Twisted. I'm not sure
what the status of that is.  The last time I made time to pay attention to
this, at the time we released Zope 3.2, the Twisted WSGI integration
had a lot of problems.  I tried to address the most urgent ones, but
ended up with a server that was much slower than ZServer, which was
much slower than the Zope 2 server.  I was also alarmed that we were
maintaining our own Twisted WSGI integration.  I don't know if the Twisted
community has gotten behind WSGI.  If not, I'm not sure we gained anything
from using Twisted.

I'm not sure anyone in the Zope Community has the appetite for performing
server maintenance.  That is why I was so anxious to move to WSGI.
Unfortunately, I don't think anyone has gotten very involved with WSGI.
When I was raising issues on the Web SIG back around the time of the
Zope 3.2 release, nobody from the Zope community seemed to be around.

Here is what I'd like to see.  I'd like to see someone get more involved
in the WSGI effort.  A very specific thing I think is needed is a WSGI
server benchmark that can be used to evaluate different WSGI servers for
both functionality and performance.  This would benefit us and other
projects.  We should use this to evaluate different WSGI servers
to see which ones best meet our needs.  This would guide our decision
whether to continue to try to support any of our existing server
and might spur server developers to greater efforts and server improvements.
I don't think this is a huge effort and certainly not a technically challenging
one.  I think that a modest effort that tested some obvious things like
speed of requests with large and small inputs and outputs, with varying levels of
concurrency, measuring speed and resource consumption would probably
spur contributions from others in the Python Web community.
I would do this myself if I didn't have a number of other projects that
I'm currently focused on.

Jim

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