[hunchentoot-devel] Different speed loading images from static apache and hunchentoot handler

[Ralf Mattes]

On Fri, 2007-03-30 at 22:57 +0200, Edi Weitz wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Mar 2007 16:24:43 -0400, "Andrei Stebakov" <lispercat at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > I got a folder on my linux box that contains about 240 images of font
> > preview generated from cl-gd (Thanks, Edi!).
> 
> Nice... :)
> 
> > When I show them from static apache handler it takes approximately 30
> > seconds. Same thing from hunchentoot static handler
> > (create-folder-dispatcher-and-handler) takes about 50 seconds. I understand
> > it's not a big deal, but still I'd like to know what might get in the way. I
> > use hunchentoot behind mod-proxy.
> > Here are links (first is static apache, second is hunchentoot):
> > http://www.greenpixeldesign.com/fonts.html
> > http://www.greenpixeldesign.com/cphandler/fonts.html
> 
> I guess it's the thread switching that takes the additional time.
> >From tests on my Linux box (using ApacheBench and a localhost
> connection) my impression was that serving static files with
> Hunchentoot wasn't slower than with Apache.

Just as a side note: unless we talk about low traffic/low volume serving
i'd expect Apache to be significantly faster than Lisp solutions - once
Apache detects that a request serves static files it uses 'sendfile' to
shuffle the file content over the network (thus avoiding to read any
data at all into userspace only to write it back to kernel space. That
does save a lot of time (and context switches)). 
That's nothing to be ashamed of as a Lisper - Lisp shines when it comes
to content generation ;-)

Cheers, Ralf Mattes