> One of that ideas I had is comparing Apache+perl, Apache+mod_perl,
> Apache+php3 and IIS+ASP [microsoft's stuff] with Comanche+Squeak:
>
> perl, php3 and ASP are all interpreted languages (I believe),
> as well as
> Squeak is.
I too am very interested in this benchmark. It should be more meaningful.
We use Squeak to serve NetUnify.com and Swiki.net with great success. We've
yet to encounter any performance issues with it. We currently serve about
700 users, and running on our local network, the performance difference
between Squeak and our internal IIS server (serving static pages) is hardly
noticeable. And, we serve everything through Squeak (images and files
included). Our bottleneck is our bandwidth (by far). Unless you are going
plop down several thousand dollars per month for a 10mbps and higher
connection to the net, then you are likely not going to hit Squeaks
performance limits...and if you do, you can always use multiple Squeak
servers.
We did however write our own socket interface to take advantage of NT's
enhanced (as compared to Win9x) socket API. One day, I'll get around to
benchmarking our server with Apache and IIS. Most of the performance
limitations of Squeak/Comanche (out of the box) have to do with HTTP
protocol support and socket interface issues (which vary by platform)...not
with Squeak itself.
For instance, we recently have implemented persistent HTTP/1.1 connections,
support for "If-Modified-Since" headers, and several other tweeks that make
a noticeable difference. We've also started using SSP to generate dynamic
pages in a lot of places where we were using text formatters (with mutiple
levels of formatting applied). In some cases, moving to SSP reduced request
processing time from 200ms to 20ms (on a less powerful development machine).
> Squeak's interpreter (VM) is always on memory, the Scripts are always
> compiled, Squeak's interpreter doesn't have a JIT, but it will
> have a good JIT
> soon.
Let's hope so...JIT will make Squeak one of the fastest VMs around (it's
already 10x faster than some of the commercial VMs)...and I doubt any other
open source VMs (for any language) can touch it...at least not any with the
popularity that Squeak has. VisualWorks will likely remain a little faster,
as will a couple other commercial VMs...most of the Java VMs don't even come
close.
> Ok, this all popped out of mi mind right to the keyboard for
> the first time
> now, so it may be all wrong...
No, I think these are valid concerns, but there are tradeoffs...you can
choose to squeeze out as much performance as possible, but keep in mind the
law of diminishing returns. Every bit of performance tweeking will likely
come at the expense of some flexibility.
- Stephen
