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

[Jim Fulton]

Stephan Richter wrote:
> On Tuesday 19 December 2006 08:24, Jim Fulton wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> I agree with your assessment. It is extremely difficult to figure out which 
> WSGI server fulfills Zope's criteria. In fact, I would suspect that only 
> ZServer (Zope 2 and 3 version) does, because noone else has such strong 
> requirements.

What requirements?  If we have such requirements, I suggest we reevaluate them.
*We do not want to be in the server business!*

Perhaps you are thinking of the buffering requirement.  I would suggest that
this be part of the benchmark.  That is, there should be a test of whether someone
can DOS a server by connecting with a non-zero content length and then not providing
input.

> I would love to see such a profiling tool too, not only for 
> testing servers, but applications as well.

Applications is totally out of scope for this IMO.  Everybody
wants benchmarks that apply across applications, but that is a pipe dream.
OTOH, it should be feasible to come up with a reasonable set of tests that
can be used to compare servers.

Jim

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