Howdy,
The Digital City extensions were written way back in 1998 :) I wrote a big
chunk of the code along with Jay Ridgeway, Nate Folkman, Shaz Chaudhri and
others. We used it extensively for sites like Aol.com, MapQuest, Moviefone,
etc. It had a bunch of goodies, many pragmatic solutions to large-scale,
multi-server installations. One popular item was "sob" which pre-dates and
was similar in use to memcache but, assuming well cacheable objects, far faster
because it utilized AolServer's large shared-memory model and persistent
control connections for a a coherent, multi-server cache. I like to say that
today's memcache "hit" was our sob-based cache "miss". It was typical for an
nsdci-based AolServer to make dozens or 100's of nssob calls building a single
page within a few 100 milliseconds. There were some other interesting pieces
like "av" which was a pre-sorted key-value pair file that would be distributed
out to the servers (could be 100 servers or more) and memmapped in "instantly".
This was the basis for a huge chunk of pre-computed published content, e.g.,
promotion indices and such. I don't think any of it is still in use at Aol
today -- for various reasons new technologies are now used but I haven't heard
that anything new approached the same level of efficiency and performance.
The downside to that stuff was topology management -- with 100 or more
connected servers for Aol.com, for example, managing the Tcl-based config files
went from something clever or at least curious to despised. Some of the
over-reliance on pre-computation of data structures in the interest of ultimate
run-time performance also began to wear on the patience of editors who had to
use increasingly over burdened back-office publishing systems (Aolserver based
as well).
So, all things in moderation, everything has it's day in the sun :)
Having said that, the nsdci module is very cool if a bit undocumented and
arcane on the config side. Oh, and that av thing? It's not 64-bit safe -- the
offsets and lengths as 32-bit integers in the on-disk file were swapped to
direct pointers on load. Didn't seem like a problem back in 1999....
Anyway, from what I've heard about node.js (which was just a guy giving a talk
about it at a conference), it sounds very cool. I think getting javascript
and/or php to run well with Aolserver would be interesting. Tcl would always
have a special place and any implementation would need a "call Tcl..." thinger,
but sounds like a cool investigation.
Just to throw salt on the open wound.... do folks want stuff like node.js or
Windows support :) Just asking...
Cheers,
-Jim
On Sep 27, 2012, at 7:41 PM, Jeff Rogers <dv...@diphi.com> wrote:
> John Buckman wrote:
>> SUGGESTIONS FOR A FUTURE AOLSERVER
>>
>> The "state of the art" is, I think, happening in the javascript world,
>> with things such as node.js. If the aolserver community were really
>> interested in getting new users, making it a top notch
>> embedded-javascript web server would be a way. I'm not sure this makes
>> any strategic sense (nor that I need it), but there you go...
>
> I'm far from the first person to chuckle at how netscape introduced
> server-side javascript 15 years ago, it pretty much vanished for a
> while, and has now come roaring back as the next big thing.
>
> Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
>
> Still, a "ns_spidermonkey" module would be a interesting project.
>
>> The other area where "state of the art" thinking is occurring, is in
>> scaling web sites to many, many machines.
>>
>> aolserver has some features to make that happen, but imagine if we had
>> multi-machine ns_cache support, perhaps with a file system backup (ie,
>> memcached)?
>
> I was thinking about this also. There is a nsmemcache module for
> naviserver, but it uses some of the C apis that have been changed
> slightly in naviserver, so it doesn't work with aolserver, but it
> shouldn't be difficult to port.
>
> A version (not sure if it's the most current) is at
> http://naviserver.cvs.sourceforge.net/naviserver/modules/nsmemcache/
>
> Another bit of existing code to build a high-scalability cluster is the
> Digital City extensions that the guys at AOL built sometime before 2006
> (I don't know exactly when, just estimating based on timestamps) and I
> believe ran some pretty big (for the day) sites on. It looks like a
> hidden treasure of functionality that never got the respect it deserved.
> Looking at the archives, there was some chatter about it on this list
> back in 2007. What's that french saying again? :)
>
> It currently lives at http://code.google.com/p/nsdci/
>
>> Also, support for sending an http page request to another machine (or
>> pool of machines) would very handy, with a single http daemon handling
>> them all with async io.
>
> I don't think this would be difficult as things are now; it would make
> a nice piece of example code.
>
> -J
>
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