[hunchentoot-devel] Hunchentoot data-transfers seem slow

[Edi Weitz]

On Thu, 22 Mar 2007 12:39:40 +0000, "Robert Synnott" <rsynnott at gmail.com> wrote:

> I was really just using the big static file to demonstrate the
> problem; it's visible when sending dynamically generated pages as
> well, but just not by so huge a margin (because the pages aren't as
> big, I think; the bigger the page, the more the speed difference
> between tbnl and hunchentoot seems to be).

I've just uploaded a new release of FLEXI-STREAMS (0.11.1) which
incorporates the patches I was talking about.  This should make
Hunchentoot output significantly faster /if/ you're using an 8-bit
encoding without line encoding conversions (like the default format),
but it'll still be an order of magnitude slower than writing binary
data directly to the stream.

Let us know if this helps.

I'm happy to accept reasonable patches to make FLEXI-STREAMS faster,
but obviously there's a certain price you have to pay for flexibility
and portability.

Note that you can of course bypass FLEXI-STREAMS if you absolutely
need the speed.  Something like this (untested):

  (defun my-handler ()
    ;; no need to generate the content before calling SEND-HEADERS,
    ;; but that way your errors will be handled by Hunchentoot
    (let ((content (generate-content))
          (stream (flexi-stream-stream (send-headers))))
      (write-sequence (maybe-convert content) stream)))

Try it...

STREAM will either be the raw socket stream or a chunked stream from
Chunga depending on how you've started your server.  (You can put
Hunchentoot behind mod_lisp and use :INPUT-CHUNKING-P NIL and
:MOD-LISP-P T to bypass Chunga as well.)