static content puts an overhead on the apache server. nginx would be good to handle the static content of your sites.
On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 12:56 AM, Graham Dumpleton<graham.dumple...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > On Jul 8, 4:16 am, Ramdas S <ram...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Hi, >> >> We have a web server where we are hosting around 12-15 django web sites most >> of them attracting modest traffic, except a couple which sees spiikes on and >> off. Together we estimate just about 20,000-40,000 page views. >> >> However we are expecting major spikes in traffic in the coming days and are >> moving to a 8 GB RAM quad core server. >> >> We are also trying to optimize the django apps. >> >> Presently we have memcached mod-python instances running. The database >> server is also running on the same server. >> >> What all should we do to ensure that such a server can handle huge volumes >> of traffic? > > Don't use mod_python for a start. See: > > http://blog.dscpl.com.au/2009/03/load-spikes-and-excessive-memory-usage.html > > Same issue can occur with mod_wsgi embedded mode, so use of mod_wsgi > daemon mode is best to avoid the problem. > >> We are presently optimizing every site with whatever we can according to >> what Yahoo! recommends for improving site performance. But that's only at >> the client side. >> >> I am told that mod wsgi is more efficient than mod-python. How efficient? Do >> your recommend moving all sites to modwsgi? > > Use of daemon mode certainly gives more predictable performance and > memory usage. Although memory usage and performance with mod_wsgi is a > bit better, in the context of a large fat Python web application using > a database, you wouldn't normally see any significant difference to > other similarly configured WSGI hosting mechanisms. This is because > all the overhead and bottlenecks are going to be in your application > and the database, not the server level. > >> What about nginx? Is it worth exploring Nginx as alternative to Apache? > > Using nginx as a front end proxy in front of Apache/mod_wsgi in order > to handle static media, deal with slow clients and avoid keep alive > resource issues in Apache is certainly a good idea. > > Using fastcgi with nginx is reasonable but may just make management > harder as likely need a separate supervisor system to keep all the > Django fastcgi processes running, something which Apache/mod_wsgi > gives you for free. > > The mod_wsgi module for nginx should possibly be avoided as it has > potential issues with blocking because of standard WSGI not being > suited for hosting on top of an event driven system. See: > > http://blog.dscpl.com.au/2009/05/blocking-requests-and-nginx-version-of.html > >> Is there anything else we need to look at? > > Caching, caching and caching. Even if you are doing a measure of > caching, look at what other caching you can do. This also need not be > caching within the application, but could be front end caching > proxies. > > As an example, for a lot of sites the bulk of traffic will be to the > front page of the site. If rather than going to the database for all > requests for that page you use cached data, you will speed up serving > up that heavily trafficked page. Better still, avoid requests even > going to the application for that page in the majority of cases by > having a caching proxy cache it with an expiry time of a few minutes. > Doing just this can in some cases dramatically reduce traffic actually > hitting your application. > > Finally, if using mod_wsgi daemon mode, ensure you delegate different > Django instances to different process groups. This way you can control > the number of processes for each instance and for less trafficked > sites give minimum number of processes/threads. For more heavily > trafficked sites give more processes. This way you don't incur as much > memory usage for the smaller trafficked sites. > > Graham > >> Thanks for the advices... >> >> Also what is the realistic number of page views/ simultaneous connections >> that a Nehalem quad core Intel i-7 920, 8 GB RAM machine can handle? Any >> statistical experiences. >> >> Thanks >> >> -- >> Ramdas S > > > -- ======================================== Mugisha Moses P.O. Box 1420 Kampala, Uganda http://appfrica.org skype name : mossplix twitter: @mugisha --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
