[hunchentoot-devel] Hunchentoot data-transfers seem slow

[Robert Synnott]

Hi,
I've messed around with Hunchentoot before a good bit, but this week
launched my first real site with a moderate number of visitors
(http://twitterbuzz.com - hunchentoot/mod_proxy). Now, the site seemed
slightly sluggish, but at first I was inclined to blame this on the
page generation. Looking closer, though, the page generation happens
practically instantly, and the slowness seems to turn up in sending
the data back to the user. Playing with apache-bench, I found that
transfer speed seems to cap out at about 250KB/s, even when just
sending a huge static page (a largish ebook off Gutenburg).

For the moment, I've shifted the site to using tbnl (with mod_lisp),
and things seem to run faster; ab can now download the ebook at about
30MB/s, and page loading on the site itself seems snappier. However,
I'm aware that tbnl is deprecated.

Is this something silly I'm doing, or an inherent limitation of
hunchentoot/flexi-streams? Also, are there any major issues with tbnl
I should be aware of?

I'm particularly concerned about this because I'm currently moving a
far larger site with lots of users to lisp, and I suspect that the
speed problem would be a real issue with it.
Rob