[hunchentoot-devel] Hunchentoot data-transfers seem slow

[Edi Weitz]

Hi,

On Wed, 21 Mar 2007 19:24:34 +0000, "Robert Synnott" <rsynnott at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

It would surely help if you could give us some info, like what Lisp
you are using, which operating system you're on, the usual stuff...
Also, maybe you can isolate a bit of stand-alone code (maybe the
single page you're talking about) so I can easily reproduce your
problems.

Having said that, you are aware of the sentence

  "Make sure to use the /newest/ versions of all of these libraries"

in the installation instructions, aren't you?  One of the culprits for
slow responses in the past has been FLEXI-STREAMS, but that should be
mostly fixed in newer releases.  (Or maybe not, but it's hard to say
without any data provided.)

Cheers,
Edi.