Re: [Tclhttpd-users] To thread, or not to thread?

[Brent W. <bre...@in...>]

For the normal web site, I don't see an urge to add threads.
I never did it for sunscript.sun.com or www.scriptics.com - did
those sites seem OK?  How do they feel in comparison with
dev.scriptics.com that uses AOLserver - heavily threaded but also
burdoned with database accesses - my measurements showed the home
page fetches for tclhttpd to be more than twice as fast as the
AOLserver fetches - primarly the database overhead, I'm sure.

If your custom domain handlers communicate with other processes via
pipes, then again I don't see a need for threads.  Do it similarly
to the CGI module, and then you should be able to use event-driven
I/O for everything.

Finally, set up a performance lab and blast your service.  You'll be
able to drive it harder than your initial customer load.  Then you
can compare both performance and reliability.

>>>Steve Blinkhorn said:
 > 
 > I would welcome some advice or shared experience as to the benefits or
 > otherwise of running tclhttpd with threads enabled.   Our intended use
 > is slightly unusual: one instance of the server will run something
 > like a normal website, with a software download available.   Said
 > software will then communicate with other instances
 > with custom domain handlers to do all sorts of fancy things.
 > 
 > There have been discussions over the past weeks and months in clt
 > which have ranged from the performance hit on thread-enabled
 > tcl, to possible flakiness of the implementation (do I remember this
 > correctly?).   Is there experience with tclhttpd in particular which
 > would help us decide whether enabling threads would on balance be
 > beneficial, and which release of tcl is considered most stable in this
 > respect?
 > 
 > Because the site in question is an entirely new (and rather different)
 > enterprise, we don't have any sensible estimate of the hit rate we may
 > expect.   We would like to generate 100,000 initial contacts in the
 > first year, which is peanuts I suppose in terms of normal dot.com
 > activity.   The conventional browseable part of the site has been designed f
     or
 > speed of access and simplicity of use.   The software download is of
 > the order of 1 Mbyte.   The fancy custom domain handler stuff will
 > spawn other processes and manage file transfers, but these files will
 > be of the order of tens of kilobytes on any one occasion.
 > 
 > I don't know if the above is enough to prompt useful comment - but the
 > traffic on this list seems to me invariably helpfu, so I live in hope.
 > 
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--	Brent Welch	<bre...@in...>
	http://www.interwoven.com