Andy Yates wrote at 2005-1-5 15:30 -0600:
... In fact we can reproduce this behavior on a fresh install. On a fresh system create a python script that puts data in a session object.
s = context.REQUEST.SESSION t = ' ' * 1024 s['data'] = t print "foo" return printed
Then call this script with your favorite bench marking program. We used apache bench (ab). This will cause python2.3 to consume all available memory and crash or lockup.
And I am not surprised at all: You allow an unlimited number of sessions. Your session timeout is 45 minutes "ab" does not honour the "set cookie" requests for the sessioning. Thus, each request creates a new session. This way, it should not be difficult to use a large amount of RAM. My Zope serves about 500 request/s, 30.000 request/min and 1.350.000 requests in 45 min. You must expect a number of sessions in this order.
... In a very basic sense this is all our production server does. When a user first comes to our site we query a mysql database for several hundred values. These values are then stored in the session object as a map. All other pages are built dynamically based on the values stored in the session object.
Is the session object system just not supposed to be used like this?
We use the session system in quite a similar way -- without problems. But, we have a maximal session count of 5.000. We, too, observe some increase in memory requirements which we do not yet understand: memory seems to increase from about 300 MB to about 600 MB within a week. Therefore, we restart once every Sunday night. But, the problem has not yet been pressing and we did not yet seriously tried to understand it. -- Dieter