At 01:21 PM 8/22/01, you wrote:
>Yes! Thank you! That elusive bit of info will clear a major roadblock to
>adopting AOLS. I've been puzzling over why the nsvhr and those other
>modules are needed, if that can be done instead. I guess the C modules
>would be good for a REALLY high traffic site. But that wouldn't be us.
Regarding multiple paths as regards virtual hosting. I find both the
simple Tcl and the C based virtual hosting techniques have their uses, it
depends on what you are trying to do.
nsvhr is really a "port 80" multiplexer. It lets you seamlessly integrate
all sorts of technology into your webservice, at the same time presenting
these services to your client on port 80. That both looks nice as well as
helps you get past firewalls.
But what I really like about nsvhr is that if one aolserver site goes down
(and they do at times) that it doesn't take any of your other sites
down. This can happen do to AOLserver bugs that haven't been fixed that
some one site exploits, or maybe because one site needs to use an as yet
experimental module.
I've found nsvhr itself to be very stable (modulo the bugs I occasionally
put into it.)
One shortcoming of AOLserver 3 (rectified in AOLserver 4) is that Tcl based
AOLservers all share the same Tcl libraries. So if you want one site to
use say library version 1 of TclFOO, and another site wants to use library
version 2 of TclFOO, you can't do that. This can lead to site upgrade
difficulties when you have lots of sites.
If you want to be an ISP that offers thousands of sites that are mainly
static pages, CGI, or use a fixed set of Tcl procs that you provide, then
Tcl based virtual hosting is what you want. If you want to piece together
a complex webservice than you may wish to use an nsvhr/apache/squid reverse
proxying solution.
Regarding speed, as Jim mention's he's had no problems with up to a million
hits using Tcl procs. Recent testing of mine
(http://www.theashergroup.com/tag/articles/reverse-proxies/vhr-benchmarks_files/connection-performance.adp)
demonstrate that an nsvhr/nssock solution can handle more than 900,000 hits
per hour (of a 2K file) (on linux) and about 2.5 million hits per day of
nothing but 32K bytes files.
Jerry
=====================================================
Jerry Asher [EMAIL PROTECTED]
1678 Shattuck Avenue Suite 161 Tel: (510) 549-2980
Berkeley, CA 94709 Fax: (877) 311-8688
