[tbnl-devel] New version 0.5.0 / Multiple back-ends

[Bob Hutchison]

Hi Stefan,

On Aug 17, 2005, at 3:39 AM, Stefan Scholl wrote:

> On 2005-08-16 22:24:56, Stefan Scholl wrote:
>
>> I was just wondering ... isn't now every proxy feature in every
>> webserver some kind of mod_lisp?
>>
>> What are the pros and cons of mod_lisp vs. proxy (+ TBNL
>> stand-alone)?
>>
>
> Forget it. mod_lisp is much, much faster. 3 to 4 times faster in
> a local test with ApacheBench against Apache 1.3 + mod_lisp +
> TBNL, lighttpd + mod_proxy + TBNL, and TBNL stand-alone.
>
> Apache 1.3 + mod_lisp + TBNL was always faster.
>

Really? That's very interesting. What lisp implementation are you  
using? I use Lispworks, and in my tests (on OS X and linux, I don't  
have a license for windows), Apache+mod_lisp+TBNL was second and TBNL  
standalone the fastest by just a bit better than a factor of *two*   
-- except on OS X, where there is a bug that I cannot identify that  
causes a lot of memory to be permanently allocated and -- depending  
on the concurrency count -- lispworks either slowly grids to a halt  
or falls over dead almost instantly. I think Araneida+TBNL was third,  
but it is really hard to say (and I think I can improve this, I don't  
quite understand why it isn't closer to the standalone TBNL). And the  
apache+proxy+?+TBNL was slowest.

However, even though using a proxy is slowest, for me, I can get my  
ISP to go along with this whereas they won't consider mod_lisp (or  
the mod_jk? java modules either, so it isn't a lisp problem). I need  
my ISP to go along with me only if I need to use port 80. Any other  
port I use standalone TBNL on linux or Araneida+TBNL on OS X -- I've  
had an application up and running now on linux (standalone TBNL) for  
just over two months now I think.

And for what its worth, these are all *way* faster than Java.

I have not tried lighttpd.

I wonder what's causing the timing differences? I'm testing against  
that application I mentioned and there are some pretty significant  
chunks of HTML generated (sometimes 100's of kb) and sometimes a non- 
trivial CPU requirement.

Cheers,
Bob

> The mod_lisp request data can be parsed without any regular
> expressions. Maybe that's enough to cause that difference in
> speed.
>
> I think I'll try to remove all calls to CL-PPCRE:SPLIT and test
> it again (later).
>
>
>
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----
Bob Hutchison          -- blogs at <http://www.recursive.ca/hutch/>
Recursive Design Inc.  -- <http://www.recursive.ca/>
Raconteur              -- <http://www.raconteur.info/>