ADVICE needed: multi-site Zope installations, PCGI and ZServer
Hi all, I'd like to gather the collective wisdom of the list on this situation I need to sort out; 1) We run Apache with lots of virtual servers. Within the virtual servers I have Rewrite rules that point to various subfolders of a Zope 1.10.3 installation, which uses PCGI. Each one of the subfolders corresponds to a site that shares a set of core DTML, ZSQL and External methods, along with their customizations specific to that subfolder (subsite). 2) This works, but the manage screens for the subsites are mangled, which can lead the admins of those sites getting very confused. I understand that this is something that can only be fixed in the innards of ZPublisher, ie beyond my ken. [DC guys - this is definitely a pain for those wanting to run several subsites from a single Zope installation, thus taking care of shared methods etc.] 3) I'm also running a Zope 2.0.0 system on a higher port number using ZServer (ie bypassing the Apache server entirely). I'm in the process of shifting parts of the 1.10.3 site to this 2.0.0 site. This site is quite fast and I'm pleased with it. The intention is to run the main site and the subsites from this installation. 4) What I *want* to do is save the effort of exporting (and keeping up to date!) to different installations of Zopethe various core methods I have in the 1.10.3 installation, whilst at the same time allowing the virtual hosts to point to subfolders in the main distribution. I also want maximum speed and to be able to keep all my Zope products *for all the subsites* in one place. (I want, I want....) 5) If I understand it correctly, if I use Apache to manage the virtual servers I *have* to use PCGI rather than ZServer. PCGI is approximately 4 times slower than ZServer (this from a Jason Thaxter email of 1/9/99) "While many benchmarking stats are meaningless, I can support Amos' basic contention that zerver is about 4x faster that apache/pcgi/zerver." My questions are: Can I *somehow* use Apache to manage the virtual hosts (passing on the authentication headers) to a ZServer based Zope instance. This way I get Apache logging and other benefits? Can I split this instance into subsites that get less confused management screens? As I'm using MySQL as my database adapter, which is currently not thread-safe, am I better off just creating these subsites separately and running three or four different Zope instances? Should I use the SOFTWARE_HOME and INSTANCE_HOME variables to run several Zope instances (each containing what would be a subsite), but only one software instance, thus keeping all my External methods and Products in one place? (and if so, any pointers on how to do this would be great) any thoughts on this would be appreciated. Cheers tone. ------ Dr Tony McDonald, FMCC, Networked Learning Environments Project http://nle.ncl.ac.uk/ The Medical School, Newcastle University Tel: +44 191 222 5888 Fingerprint: 3450 876D FA41 B926 D3DD F8C3 F2D0 C3B9 8B38 18A2
Tony McDonald wrote:
5) If I understand it correctly, if I use Apache to manage the virtual servers I *have* to use PCGI rather than ZServer. PCGI is approximately 4 times slower than ZServer (this from a Jason Thaxter email of 1/9/99) "While many benchmarking stats are meaningless, I can support Amos' basic contention that zerver is about 4x faster that apache/pcgi/zerver."
It is possible to run ZServer behind Apache. Take a look at the WEBSERVER.txt file in the docs directory of the source distribution. Essentially, you run z2.py with an argument telling it where the PCGI file is. If you configure Apache and ZServer to use the same PCGI config file, it works fine. And it is *MUCH* faster than PCGI since you get multithreading. Doug
At 6:03 pm +0000 14/9/99, Doug Hellmann wrote:
It is possible to run ZServer behind Apache. Take a look at the WEBSERVER.txt file in the docs directory of the source distribution. Essentially, you run z2.py with an argument telling it where the PCGI file is. If you configure Apache and ZServer to use the same PCGI config file, it works fine. And it is *MUCH* faster than PCGI since you get multithreading.
Doug
Cheers Doug, I presume we're talking about the 'Using Zope in multi-threaded mode with ZServer' part of the docs? I'm in the process of trying that out. I still have a mental block re: PCGI and ZServer (drat!). I'm presuming that using this method, I'll get the performance of ZServer, whilst being able to use the Virtual hosting ability of Apache. If so, mark me up as one happy camper..... Can anyone answer that question definitively please? ta tone. ------ Dr Tony McDonald, FMCC, Networked Learning Environments Project http://nle.ncl.ac.uk/ The Medical School, Newcastle University Tel: +44 191 222 5888 Fingerprint: 3450 876D FA41 B926 D3DD F8C3 F2D0 C3B9 8B38 18A2
participants (2)
-
Doug Hellmann -
Tony McDonald