Bill Atkins wrote: > "Martin P. Hellwig" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> Bill Atkins wrote: >> <cut> >>> How do you define scalability? >>> >> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3Ascalability&btnG=Google+Search >> >> ;-) >> >> -- >> mph > > OK, my real question is: what features of Python make it "scalable"? > Well I'm no expert, but I guess the ease of creating network services and clients make it quite scalable. For example, I'm creating a xmlrpcserver that returns a randomized cardlist, but I because of fail-over I needed some form of scalability , my solution was to first randomize the deck then marshal it and dump the file on a ZFS partition, giving back the client a ticket number, the client can then connect with the ticket number to receive the cardlist (read the file - unmarshal it).
While this is overkill for 1 server, I needed multiple because of fail-over and load-balancing, in this case I have 3 'crypto' boxes (with hardware crypto engines using OpenBSD) doing only the randomizing and 4 solaris machines doing the zfs and distribution of the list. By using xmlrpc and DNS round-robin, I can just add boxes and it scales without any problem, The ZFS boxes are the front-end listening to the name 'shuffle' and are connecting to a private network to my crypto boxes listening to the name 'crypto'. So as long as I make DNS aliases (I have a little script that hearbeats the boxes and when not responding within 10 seconds removes it alias) and install the right scripts on the box I can scale till I'm round the earth. Of course when the machine amount gets over a certain degree I have to add some management functionality. Now I don't say that I handle this situation well and that its the right solution, but it worked for me and it was easy and fun to do with python, but I guess that any language in this sence should be 'scalable' and perhaps other languages have even better built-in networking libraries but I'm not a professional programmer and until I learn other languages (and are comfortable enough to use it) I'll keep on using python for my projects. For me python is easy, scalable, fun and by this the 'best' but that is personal and I simply don't know whether my opinion will change in the future or not. -- mph -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list