In short, Apache is not necessarily the best platform for long polling (comet) style applications. Possible for smaller numbers of concurrent requests, bit not when number of concurrent requests can balloon out.
The important thing to note is that although you may have certain URLs which require long polling, and so a solution such as gunicorn with eventlet worker may be better, or even Tornado, this doesn't mean that you need to or should as a result convert you whole application to such a mechanism. What some large systems do is still use Apache/mod_wsgi behind nginx to do the heavy lifting and only proxy certain URLs from nginx through to separate Python web application which handles long polling. In other words, recognise that different parts of your application have different requirements and use different hosting technologies for each as appropriate. Graham On 9 June 2011 19:11, Damjan <[email protected]> wrote: >> Thus I thought about long polling. >> >> As I never used this technology I am not sure about the load such an >> implementation would put on the server host and whether I could use >> mod_wsgi for such an appliation >> >> My setup / intended application. >> - the web server has only port 443 (https) as incoming port >> -- a max of about 100 web browsers might be connected at the same time > > This means you will have 100 mod_wsgi threads blocked with client > connections, possible but not optimal at all. > >> Are there any other suggestions how to setup such a server in a way, >> that it doesn't waste too many resources? > > There're a lot of ways to make this. > > One is to use nginx and the optional push module[1]. With it, nginx > keeps the long-poll connections active, and you just http POST to a > special (private) url to notify all the clients. The good thing is > that this can work with any backaend language. And it's generally > preferential to use nginx in front of Apache anyway. > > Other option is to use some specially crafted backend (python gevent, > erlang?) to handle the long-polls. There are also special servers that > are supposed to generically handle long-poll connections (but they > seem complicated). > > [1] http://pushmodule.slact.net/ > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "modwsgi" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/modwsgi?hl=en. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "modwsgi" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/modwsgi?hl=en.
