Re: [Chicken-users] rails-like framework

[Alex Shinn]

At Sun, 23 Apr 2006 11:08:33 +0200, Peter Busser wrote:
> 
> > In
> > this sense, Spiffy is closer to Yaws (http://yaws.hyber.org), a
> > webserver written in Erlang, and in the following benchmark Yaws is
> > shown to completely outscale Apache 2.0, handling over 80,000 requests
> > compared to Apache's 4000:
> > 
> >   http://www.sics.se/~joe/apachevsyaws.html
> 
> Sounds good, except that Yaws is not Spiffy and Erlang is not Chicken.
> However, it would certainly be interesting to see the same benchmark performed
> on Spiffy.

I did say "is closer to," which seemed fair since we're all waving our
hands and making stuff up here :)

In the absense of any lies^Wstatis^Wbenchmarks, I'd wager Chicken's
thread handling is closer to Erlang than to POSIX threads.  And if you
look at the conclusions on that Apache comparison, the author suggests
the reason Apache doesn't scale has nothing to do with the Apache code
itself, but rather because POSIX threads themselves do not scale.

BTW, I believe Termite threads are within a factor 1.x the speed of
Erlang threads, and there has been mention of Tint, a Chicken port of
Termite.

> > For Ajax sites, small dynamic requests are the norm and this
> > scalability is essential.
> 
> Except that Ajax is not the kind of static HTML content Shawn was talking
> about.

Yes, but Ajax and more generally dynamic content is _exactly_ what
Rails is about.  Since that is the topic of this thread, benchmarking
static data isn't very meaningful.

> > P.P.S. you can always use Spiffy along with Apache via mod_proxy and
> > mod_rewrite.  synthcode.com runs on a Scheme webserver on the same
> > machine as several friends who all use Apache (and, sadly, rails).
> 
> Sure you can do that. But that is not going to make Spiffy faster than
> Apache.

Indeed no, that was an unrelated point to an earlier comment.  Someone
mentioned out that many people are stuck with Apache, and there were
suggestions of using FCGI or SCGI.  I was pointing out that this was
entirely unecessary, and you could still run Spiffy-based applications
behind Apache.

> Nor does it make it a good idea to put everything in Spiffy. I mean, the
> generation of code depending on the database layout (if I understand
> correctly, that is the main advantage of Rails) could be useful for
> stand-alone application development too. Why should it be limited to only
> web-site development? Or to only one web-server? There is no need to
> unnecessarily limit its usefulness.

Sure, this makes perfect sense, though an easy-to-use Spiffy interface
built on top of the core functionality would be nice, just as Rails
has Webrick.

-- 
Alex