In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Dave Brueck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Paul Rubin wrote: >> How would you go about building such a site? Is LAMP really the right >> approach? > >Two major problems I've noticed, don't know if they are universal, but they >sure >hurt the performance: > >1) Some sites have not put any thought into caching - i.e. the application >server is serving up images or every single page is dynamically generated even >though all (or most) of it is static such that most of the requests just >aren't >cacheable. > >2) Because a database is there, it gets used, even when it shouldn't, and it >often gets used poorly - bad or no connection pooling, many trips to the >database for each page generated, no table indices, bizarro database schemas. > >Overall I'd say my first guess is that too much is being generated on the fly, >often because it's just easier not to worry about cacheability, but a good web >cache can provide orders of magnitude improvement in performance, so it's >worth >some extra thought. > >One project we had involved the users navigating through a big set of data, >narrowing down the set by making choices about different variables. At any >point >it would display the choices that had been made, the remaining choices, and >the >top few hits in the data set. We initially thought all the pages would have to >be dynamically generated, but then we realized that each page really >represented >a distinct and finite state, so we went ahead and built the site with Zope + >Postgres, but made it so that the URLs were input to Zope and told what state >to >generate. > >The upshot of all this is that we then just ran a web spider against Zope any >time the data changed (once a week or so), and so the site ended up "feeling" >pretty dynamic to a user but pretty much everything came straight out of a >cache. > >-Dave
A couple years ago the Tomshardware.com website was reengeneered to cache everything possible with great performance improvement. They wrote a nice article about the project, which I assume is still online. I don't -- a d y k e s @ p a n i x . c o m Don't blame me. I voted for Gore. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
