On 2007.09.01, Dave Bauer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> I agree, where is AOLserver going. What was the motivation to make the
> big changes for AOLserver 4.5?
Without violating terms of any NDAs I may still be bound to, I'll try to
describe a real scenario (names changed to protect the ignorant, etc.):
Suppose you have a large content management system, where
application (Tcl) code of varying quality is contributed by a large
number of developers. Some requests may be poorly behaved and take
up more system resources than others. The pipe-dream of "review all
code, test it thoroughly, and prevent such poorly behaving code from
making it to production" just isn't respected, for whatever reason.
How do you keep such a system operational? Being able to "sandbox"
those requests might be one way: instead of letting those requests
consume all server threads, resulting in an unresponsive server to
all its users, you sandbox those requests to its own private thread
pool. If users making those requests exhaust its pool, this doesn't
affect the rest of the system's users making other requests.
During key operational times, a server restart to define and/or tune
these sandboxes isn't an option. While we can schedule restarts in
advance, taking the system down during busy periods isn't
acceptable. So, these pools need to be definable at system runtime
and requests be assigned to them, all without a server restart.
I would speculate that this was one of the key drivers behind the whole
ns_pools/ns_limits change in 4.5. What other "big changes" were there
in 4.5?
The ns_proxy implementation was a fresh implementation (and hopefully an
improvement) over the closed-source "dci proxy" code internal to AOL, as
people continuously clamor for AOL to keep contributing more into the
open source community.
> Tom's right. There are 55 open items, some from 2003 but I would not
> say this is a major problem. The big problem is understanding where
> AOLserver should go from here, before people start working on it.
Absolutely. Where does the community want to take it? I do think
shoring up the documentation should remain a key objective and I'm going
to reach out to various tech. writing communities to see what kind of
help they might offer.
Would there be interest in funding a tech. writer for a short period of
time? If we had a fund-raiser, perhaps we could hire one on a contract
basis for a couple of months? In that case, what goals would we like to
set? Those who would contribute funds: what documentation would you
like to see authored and/or updated?
-- Dossy
--
Dossy Shiobara | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://dossy.org/
Panoptic Computer Network | http://panoptic.com/
"He realized the fastest way to change is to laugh at your own
folly -- then you can let go and quickly move on." (p. 70)
--
AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/
To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
with the
body of "SIGNOFF AOLSERVER" in the email message. You can leave the Subject:
field of your email blank.
