[Bese-devel] Websites using UCW

[Marco Baringer]

rm at fabula.de writes:

> I'd also guess that most sites using UCW are intranet sites closed to
> public access. If partial use of UCW is enough for being listed, the 
> following site uses UCW's yaclml template engine (which seems to be 
> blazingly fast :) to render database/kb content <http://rezensionen.zeit.de>.
> Given the current _precieved_ speed of a full-blown UCW application i'd
> worry about putting it on our live servers (but that _highly_ depends on
> your expected load).
>
> hth Ralf Mattes

i profiled a ucw app a while ago, here's what i learned (not that i
did anything about it):

1) parsing and compiling tal files is slow and eats _lots_ of
   memory. simply using caching generators reduced response time by
   15%.

2) tal files are compiled into function containing many write-string
   forms, 30% of the time was being spent in write-string (on
   openmcl). to make matters worse ucw uses a string-otutput-stream
   during the request/response loop which is, once the request
   handling is over, written out to the stream. writing directly to
   the stream would probably make things faster and consume less
   memory (again, i didn't actually try anything).

3) i'd like to do some profiling on sbcl or cmucl which have more
   helpfull profilers than openmcl+shark.

4) <ucw:select tags are very slow on large lists. by default they are
   implemnetd with an alist, this is fine for small sets but makes a
   very noticable difference when you've got a drop down box with >
   100 elements. i'd probably due well to change the default to a hash
   table.

4) looking up sessions, calling actions, saving backtracks, etc. (all
   the stuff i'd have though would have been slow) consumed 0% of the
   resources (lost in the noise).

here's a data point: idiproject.com runs on an AMD Athlon 2.2 GHz, has
1 GB of ram and a seagate IDE disk (i think, i don't actually know
what all the components are). using ab and of a LAN it handled about
15 hits a second (testing the 'arbitral cases' search form).

-- 
-Marco
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget the perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
	-Leonard Cohen