I'm working on a very short timetable to accrue a list of viable technologies for a probable site migration. The story is long, but Geoff Talvola recommended I post here for insight, so I shall.
I'm part of a small dev team working on a website with pretty big traffic. Today, we have zope in front of ILU (yes, ILU) on Python 1.5.2 as our platform. We have right around 30 servers deployed, over twenty of them running Zope, and we're having problems keeping up during peak ours. We expect to be completely overwhelmed by June. This prompts us to look at switching architectures and technologies. The guy who is closest in authority and responsibilities to a lead architect thinks we should scrap the python infrastructure and move to Java (Tomcat, Struts, JBoss). The development team, aware of what that means to our development cycle and net productivity, is resisting that. I'm our best hope for coming up with a working alternative. For a long time, I've looked at alternate technologies that we might be able to use, if a day like this were going to come. Until yesterday, I did not believe such a day would. Now that it has, I don't feel like I've come up with solid answers, and very few facts to support those answers. My personal preference is for the WebKit -- I've always liked the Servlet/WebObjects architectural style, and I think WebKit has built that architecture out very well. We have a fairly lengthy list of proposed requirements, but the biggest is that our site is very dynamic on almost every page, and we have a high volume of traffic that's climbing every day. It's also worth noting that we plan to stop distributing processes in a services-based architecture, and plan to distribute only the sessions: everything else will run on a single box. I'm concerned about performance, but less today than yesterday. My biggest concern today is finding people who have proven technological solutions in play at high-volume sites. I'd also appreciate a candid evaluation of the "readiness state" of python technologies, including WebKit's various components. I would also appreciate any pointers to good solutions I might have overlooked. I've examined mod_python and Twisted, and looked at new versions of Zope, and at WebWare. The former don't appear to do what we want, and I'm still trying to sort out the details of the latter two. My belief is that Zope (because DTML is interpreted on the fly) will be too slow for our needs. Thanks, --G. -- Geoff Gerrietts "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, geoff @ gerrietts.net and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal." http://www.gerrietts.net/ --Oscar Wilde ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Etnus, makers of TotalView, The debugger for complex code. Debugging C/C++ programs can leave you feeling lost and disoriented. TotalView can help you find your way. Available on major UNIX and Linux platforms. Try it free. www.etnus.com _______________________________________________ Webware-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/webware-discuss
