I assume what you see are "hangs" i.e. Zope appearing to not accept new requests, as soon as all 4 worker threads are busy waiting for the RDBMS system to answer.

Now, using more threads will push back the point of unresponsiveness, but as soon as you have the 13th request hitting Zope, you are back at square one.

I see two ways of tackling the situation:

- Optimize the hell out of your RDBMS and your SQL queries. Make them return fast enough to handle the load.

- Write a front-end that does not rely on Zope but takes advantage of Apache's scalability features. This could be done in mod_python or mod_perl for example.

In that one project I am thinking about we ended up doing both. Sometimes you just have to accept that Zope is probably not the right tool for the job.

Stefan


On 2. Mai 2005, at 15:28, Jim Abramson wrote:


Upping the number of threads is unlikely to give you better performance. The only case where this could make sense is if you had something like a highly saturated RDBMS backend, tying up your worker threads.


Well this is *exactly* the issue I'm facing. I need to soften the impact of this situation if possible, and it's going to be ZEO in the end, but rolling this out is probably not going to be possible in the very short term.

But - Zope threads don't operate like you probably expect
from knowing Apache and similar models. For one, they *never*
will run in parallel.
Python employs a global interpreter lock (GIL), so there will
only be a single thread "working" at all times. What you want
is to up the number of processes (interpreters) not the
number of threads. Hence ZEO.


So far I've done some very off-the-cuff tests upping the threads/connections to 12/16 and banging on it with jmeter. The results were favorable in comparison to the default config. Could this have been a fluke?

Jim


-- Software Engineering is Programming when you can't. --E. W. Dijkstra

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