Lighttpd

Posted by Daniel Lyons Thu, 11 Oct 2007 01:41:00 GMT

I’ve been playing around with lighttpd on another project. This server is seriously fast. With PHP through FastCGI, it’s really astonishingly quick even on a rather bland VPS server.

For more performance I am tinkering around with eAccelerator for PHP bytecode caching. That should eliminate most of the PHP parsing/interpreting cost. Not that I can even notice it now.

But you can go even further with mod_magnet. They don’t yet have a great introduction or explanation of what mod_magnet is, but it seems to be compiled, limited Lua scripting inside the request handling. This apparently beats the socks off talking to PHP, especially since it can reassemble output from its own file caches or memcached. On the wiki above they managed to get a script that was capable of a not-to-shabby 100 requests/second and make the server serve pages at 4200 requests/second. Another script is made to serve 10,000 requests/second.

I have to wonder whether or not this could be used with Voltaire. It would certainly be pretty fast…

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Python

Posted by Daniel Lyons Thu, 21 Sep 2006 04:27:30 GMT

I didn’t expect to say this ever again, but I have to say it: Python is good. Python 2.5 brings it back up to speed with Ruby. Plus it’s faster and it has the best web development environment on Earth. And SQLAlchemy rocks my socks.

Python 2.5 cool features:

  • Partial function application. Helloooo functional programming. :)
  • The with Statement: Feature parity with Ruby, one feature at a time.
  • Generators are now full coroutines
  • Conditional expressions a la the infamous ternary operator
  • Built-in SQLite

SQLAlchemy, glory that it is, is a full SQL abstraction layer, meaning pretty much any SQL statement can be implemented just by calling functions in Python without handing over any raw SQL, and then on top of that you get the most flexible object-relational mapping system I’ve ever seen. Goodbye meaningless auto-incrementing IDs, hello sexy object relationships in the database with meaningful primary keys.

Pylons I can’t even begin to describe the excellence of. In short: it takes everything good from Rails and improves it. It uses WSGI throughout, which means it’s shockingly flexible: replace the template system, the backend web server, or anything in between and reuse everything else. The excellent Routes library borrows Ruby’s routing system, and the superb FormEncode makes validation quite simple. In the near future FormBuild will make it so that I never have to make a form by hand again and AuthKit will abstract out all authentication/authorization problems. It rocks in every way Zope wants to but can’t.

Enough free advertising. Thanks to Ben and James and everyone else for implementing an excellent framework! May it hit 1.0 soon!

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