Torsten Schlabach wrote:
ATM I am only concerned about making Forrest
genuinely useful as a live server, which IMO is a blocker for any
serious request to infra.
Are you saying Forrest is not up to performing as a serious live server
right now? If I understood that right, why would that be the case?
I don't think that is the point, rather there is no proven case of
Forrest being used as a live server. That is we cannot currently answer
questions such as:
- Can Forrest be safely left running on a server without consuming all
resources?
- What is the minimum recomended specification for a Forrest server?
- can a Forrest site, hosted live on ABC server, handle a load of x page
requests in a minute?
and so on.
No admin will entrust their critical services to a server that cannot
provide these answers. They need to see it proven in a test environment
first.
I agree with David that we should use the forthcoming zones to do these
experiments. David, will we be able to do load testing in this zone?
Another problem I see with live hosting is that all the error reporting
that Forrest does is done when we build the site. That is, documents are
not validated before a Forrest run and we don't check for broken links.
For the live hosting environment I would like to see these checks being
run on a periodic basis and reports being generated for the admin.
Perhaps this could be a part of the fallover recovery. For example, we
could build a static version of the site every X hours and deploy this
(using Forrestbot) to a static server which will be used should the live
one fail.
Ross
