On 4/28/08, rich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>  Yes, I too am at a similar level of confusion as to when django is not
>  thread safe.

With the python GIL, is it even possible to create a python program
that isn't thread-safe? I thought that was the whole point of having a
GIL in the first place; make concurrency a non-issue.

But maybe mod_wsgi throws that assumption out the door. I wouldn't
know about that.

>
>  I assume this could happen only if I explicitly create new threads
>  myself, or if I use some non-django module that isn't itself thread
>  safe.
>
>  Would be fantastic if someone could clarify this!
>
>  many thanks
>
>  Richard
>
>
>
>  On Apr 27, 11:08 pm, Prairie Dogg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>  > I'm still trying to wrap my head around what the advantages of
>  > worker MPM are, I've read a couple articles that have started me
>  > down this road - the consensus view seems to be worker MPM
>  > w/ mod_wsgi is the best way to go from a memory and separtion
>  > of concerns POV, the only potential drawback being that your
>  > django app needs to be 'thread safe'.  Sadly I'm too much of
>  > a novice to really understand what that means in terms of my
>  > code or what sorts of patterns I should be using or avoiding.
>  >
>  > On Apr 27, 7:17 am, rich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>  >
>  > > Thanks for sharing!
>  >
>  > > My setup is similar to yours except I don't use nginx at all - just
>  > > another apache virtual host for media.mysite.com. Not sure which is
>  > > best, but one less moving part from my point of view?
>  >
>  > > I haven't done any load testing, but I really like the way mod_wsgi
>  > > works; I use it in daemon mode (with worker MPM Apache) - it's never
>  > > caused me a problem and **feels** tidier than fcgi.
>  >
>  > > Also I have much less memcached - only 16MB, but I'm on a 256Mb
>  > > slicehost slice, for now; I haven't explored any optimisations here as
>  > > I'm still building core features in my first django project.
>  >
>  > > I've had one drama where Gutsy crashed: out of memory, unfortunately I
>  > > didn't realise until all log evidence fell off the end of the syslog
>  > > cliff.
>  >
>  > > Happy optimising
>  > > Rich
>  >
>  > > On Apr 27, 3:16 pm, Prairie Dogg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>  >
>  > > > Hey Everybody,
>  >
>  > > > I've been using django for almost a year now and I've been spending
>  > > > some time recently trying to optimize the slicehost VPS(s) that I use
>  > > > to run several django sites I've developed.  I wanted to share my
>  > > > findings with the larger group in hopes that my oversights can be
>  > > > pointed out and whatever 'findings' I've made can be useful to folks
>  > > > who are just starting off.  I've been developing a blow-by-blow of my
>  > > > slicehost setup - I gained a lot from the "dreamier django dream
>  > > > server" blog post a while back.  But to make things brief for the
>  > > > first post, I'll just summarize my setup here:
>  >
>  > > > 512 meg slicehost slice w/ Hardy Heron
>  > > > memcached with cmemcached bindings doin' its cache thang with 256 megs
>  > > > of RAM
>  > > > nginx on port 80 serving static files
>  > > > apache mpm worker on 8080 w / mod_wsgi serving dynamic content
>  > > > postgres 8.3 w/ geo libraries
>  > > > django_gis (thanks justin!)
>  > > > my application
>  >
>  > > > I'll keep it to 3 sections of musings for this post:
>  >
>  > > > triage troubles
>  > > > memcached musings
>  > > > context-processor conundrum
>  >
>  > > > triage troubles
>  >
>  > > > At pycon someone asked Jacob KM what he used to performance test his
>  > > > websites and he said "siege".  A quick google search turned it up
>  > > > (http://www.joedog.org/JoeDog/Siege).
>  > > > I seem to recall Jacob mentioning that this was his preferred method
>  > > > because it was more of a "real life" test than perhaps benchmarking
>  > > > tools that would profile the code.  Compiling and using siege was a
>  > > > snap.  My test was of a site I wrote that does a lot of database
>  > > > queries to draw up any given page (mostly because of a complex
>  > > > sidebar) when I turned it on, real easy like, to a dev server, the
>  > > > server crumbled with only 10 simultaneous users and anything higher
>  > > > than 5 clicks per user.
>  >
>  > > > Observation #1: Make sure your debug settings are turned off.
>  >
>  > > > After I turned debug settings off, performance maybe doubled, but
>  > > > still was nothing that could handle even moderate traffic gracefully.
>  > > > 20 simultaneous users on 3 clicks per user were getting up into the
>  > > > 20+ second wait for a response range. Basically awful.  Not shocked,
>  > > > because I knew that my db querying was horrendously inefficient.  This
>  > > > was OK, because I had memcached up my sleeve.  An observation that I
>  > > > made on the first test that was constant throughout all subsequent
>  > > > tests, was that initial queries were the fastest and subsequent
>  > > > queries became progressively slower and slower.  I'm assuming this is
>  > > > because of something like queries queuing up at that db, or running
>  > > > through memory, but I don't have enough context or knowledge of the
>  > > > whole stack to isolate the problem, more on this later.
>  >
>  > > > memcached musings
>  >
>  > > > I went on and compiled cmemcache because the consensus opnion on the
>  > > > internets is that its fastest.  I'll just assume that's so because it
>  > > > has 'c' in the name and if you read it on the internets, it must be
>  > > > true.
>  >
>  > > > I put in all the cache settings, put in the Cache middleware and ran
>  > > > siege again, waiting for the glorius results.  Blam.  Exactly the
>  > > > same.  Actually, a little worse.  I scratched my head for about 3
>  > > > hours before I realized that I had mistyped the memcached port number
>  > > > in the settings.  After that, much improved.  I could do 300
>  > > > simultaneous visitors doing 3-5 clicks apiece with tolerable
>  > > > performace.  1000 visits doing 1 click each also held up very well,
>  > > > the longest response time being in the 4-6 second range.  Without
>  > > > fail, the earliest requests were the shortest wait, many well under a
>  > > > second,  the last requests were the longest waits.  Also, as I
>  > > > ratcheted up pressure from siege, I was running top on the 'beseiged'
>  > > > server watching the running processes.  I notice a ton of postgres
>  > > > processes.  This challenged my notion of how memcached worked.  I
>  > > > thought that memcached would take the resulting page for a given view
>  > > > and spit it back out if the url was requested again with no database
>  > > > involved.  I was still hitting the db _alot_.
>  >
>  > > > Observation #2 Is this thing on?: Memcached really does dramatically
>  > > > improve your sites responsiveness under load, if you don't see massive
>  > > > improvement, you haven't gotten memcached configured correctly.
>  >
>  > > > context-processor conundrum
>  >
>  > > > Then I remembered that I had written a custom context processor that
>  > > > was doing the bulk of the nasty database querying.  I reckon that
>  > > > whatever the order of operations was for request / response handling,
>  > > > the result of the context processing was not getting cached.  So I
>  > > > wrote 4-5 lines to check / set the cache in my custom
>  > > > context_processors.py  and voila, that instantly knocked all queries
>  > > > to the db down to zero.  Despite the absense of postgres processes
>  > > > stacking up, the same phenom of early queries fast, subsequent queries
>  > > > slow still applied, at this point I'm not exactly sure what's causing
>  > > > it.  It's not that it's surprising, its just that I'd like to
>  > > > understand exactly why its happening.
>  >
>  > > > Observation #3:  Low level cachin' works well in cases like
>  > > > context_processors, or other expensive non-view functions.
>  >
>  > > > OK - I'll stop here for now, I hope this was useful or at least
>  > > > amusing.  I'd love to hear stories from other "optimization" newbies
>  > > > or suggestions from the experts about how folks go about their
>  > > > optimizing their own projects.
>  >
>  > > > Perhaps more on this to come.
>  >
>


-- 
Venlig hilsen / Kind regards,
Christian Vest Hansen.

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