I fully understand the issue of time.

The Database Server page (https://docs.basex.org/12/Database_Server) doesn’t 
really provide the details I’m looking for.

In particular, it’s not clear to me how a BaseX server would be used with an 
HTTP server in order to manage parallel query execution and ensure a responsive 
web site in the face of 100s of concurrent web users making 1000s of query 
requests. My current architecture handles this in terms of responsiveness and 
horizontal scaling, but as you say, it runs into issues with contention on 
locks for databases being updated.

I know other people have successfully implemented public-facing web sites with 
BaseX so I’m curious how they’ve done it—is the life cycle of their content 
such that updates are not much of an issue or are they doing something 
different? Am I missing some way to make a single BaseX server take advantage 
of all available cores? I understood a Java JVM as using a single core, but 
maybe my understanding is wrong?

It may be that BaseX as I’m using it is not the right way to do what I’m doing. 
For example, it might make more sense to implement the web site using a typical 
node.js and React system that then uses BaseX exclusively through a REST API. 
That still presents the problem of how to scale handling of queries but avoids 
any issues with the web site itself being responsive. My team is learning how 
to use node.js, next.js, and React for other projects so it’s something we 
could explore.

I could also explore using other database solutions for some or all of what I 
want to do. For example, maybe it makes more sense to put my where-used table 
into a key-value store (even Solr could work for this pretty easily) or a SQL 
database and reserve BaseX for doing the XML-aware data processing needed to 
construct the table and doing other XML- and text-aware queries. But that would 
still run into performance issues, where I’m looking for 10ms response times 
for doing lookups in the where-used table.

Or maybe I just need to do more caching of query results where the results are 
stable for a given content set.

I started this project without any particular plan and got a long way just 
building it as I went but now that I’m tasked with fixing a number of design 
and behavior issues with my initial approach, I need to make sure I really know 
what I’m doing and make the most appropriate implementation choices.

Thanks,

Eliot
_____________________________________________
Eliot Kimber
Sr. Staff Content Engineer
O: 512 554 9368

servicenow

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From: Christian Grün <christian.gr...@gmail.com>
Date: Thursday, December 12, 2024 at 5:11 AM
To: Eliot Kimber <eliot.kim...@servicenow.com>
Cc: basex-talk@mailman.uni-konstanz.de <basex-talk@mailman.uni-konstanz.de>
Subject: Re: [basex-talk] Deeper discussion of BaseX client/server and web app 
implementation?
[External Email]

________________________________
Hi Eliot,

Free time is a rare resource nowadays; just some quick feedback:

> I’ve done a read through of the current documentation at 
> https://docs.basex.org/<https://docs.basex.org/> and also reviewed what I 
> could find online and such. In the documentation I find a number of 
> references to the “client/server” architecture but I’m not finding any 
> particularly deep discussion of it, either in the docs or by searching on 
> i.e., “basex client server”.

The best entry point may be Getting Started → Database Server [1].

> When I started my Mirabel project I understood that the way to get 
> concurrency was to use multiple BaseX HTTP instances, which can make 
> concurrent read requests on a single set of databases.

That’s dangerous (and has always been problematic). If you use have concurrent 
operations, you should have one central HTTP instance. Otherwise, you might run 
into concurrency issues and locked databases, as multiple JVMs cannot share 
their information among each other [2].

It may be difficult to give profound answers on the remaining questions in a 
few lines. Maybe others can share their experiences.

Best,
Christian

[1] 
https://docs.basex.org/12/Getting_Started<https://docs.basex.org/12/Getting_Started>
[2] 
https://docs.basex.org/main/Startup#concurrent_operations<https://docs.basex.org/main/Startup#concurrent_operations>

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