Running ZEO on a single server -- advisable? Why?
Back in August, runyaga wrote:
you should never go into production without ZEO. you should never add live components / migrate a plone server / pack ZODB on a server that serves requests. ~runyaga
Does this ZEO suggestion even apply on single server zope machines? Is this standard operating procedure? Is it written up anywhere as such? I have run naked Zope on some boxes for years without problems, and Zope behind Apache. But I'm currently setting up some new boxen and would like to know the rationale for using ZEO on them. Do you run ZEO on standalone boxes? What are the advantages? What are the disadvantages? Does it make a difference with dual processor servers? Thanks, =Paul
One reason to run ZEO is to spread the load over several ZEO clients. Using ZEO on the machine does not make sense in this case. It might make sense for dual processor machines to utilize both CPUs. Using ZEO on a single-CPU machine makes sense for debugging and development but not very much for production. -aj --On Sonntag, 19. Oktober 2003 8:51 Uhr -0400 Paul Howell <paul@smoothstone.com> wrote:
Back in August, runyaga wrote:
you should never go into production without ZEO. you should never add live components / migrate a plone server / pack ZODB on a server that serves requests. ~runyaga
Does this ZEO suggestion even apply on single server zope machines? Is this standard operating procedure? Is it written up anywhere as such? I have run naked Zope on some boxes for years without problems, and Zope behind Apache. But I'm currently setting up some new boxen and would like to know the rationale for using ZEO on them.
Do you run ZEO on standalone boxes? What are the advantages? What are the disadvantages? Does it make a difference with dual processor servers?
Thanks, =Paul
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OK, well I have a dual processor machine to set up. Does anyone run ZEO on their dual processor for production? With what OS and parameters? Does it help improve performance? Thanks. =Paul At 02:59 PM 10/19/2003 +0200, Andreas Jung wrote:
One reason to run ZEO is to spread the load over several ZEO clients. Using ZEO on the machine does not make sense in this case. It might make sense for dual processor machines to utilize both CPUs. Using ZEO on a single-CPU machine makes sense for debugging and development but not very much for production.
-aj
Paul Howell wrote:
OK, well I have a dual processor machine to set up. Does anyone run ZEO on their dual processor for production? With what OS and parameters? Does it help improve performance?
The folks at plone.org are running their site with two ZEO clients at one Dual-XEON. It seems to work pretty well, site performance has improved much since the switch. See http://plone.org/about/server for further information. regards tom
Paul Howell wrote at 2003-10-19 08:51 -0400:
Back in August, runyaga wrote:
you should never go into production without ZEO. you should never add live components / migrate a plone server / pack ZODB on a server that serves requests.
I do not follow most of these advices. We used Zope without ZEO for several years. We add components and pack the ZODB on servers that serve requests, although not a peak times. Dieter
Dieter Maurer wrote Paul Howell wrote at 2003-10-19 08:51 -0400: Back in August, runyaga wrote: you should never go into production without ZEO. you should never add live components / migrate a plone server / pack ZODB on a server that serves requests.
I do not follow most of these advices.
We used Zope without ZEO for several years.
Well, I know I wouldn't recommend serving any live site with real users without ZEO. Our primary site has something like 7 or 8 ZEO clients on a bunch of various sized Sun boxes, sitting behind Pythondirector. Before ZEO, we'd constantly get thwacked with strange errors and glitches - now if a machine glitches, the auto-checker (which has a very very itchy trigger finger) restarts it immediately. The director stops the downed server getting any requests til it comes back up. It now takes a pretty serious visit from Mr. Cockup to actually make the website unavailable at all. Anthony -- Anthony Baxter <anthony@interlink.com.au> It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
On Sun, Oct 19, 2003 at 08:51:36AM -0400, Paul Howell wrote:
Do you run ZEO on standalone boxes? What are the advantages?
- zope restarts faster - you can connect to zeo with another zeo client and do administrative or debugging tasks without slowing down or interrupting your main zope server - e.g. packing, debugging with python.
What are the disadvantages?
- raw zodb performance is slower - you must take care to protect the zeo port. A sufficiently knowledgeable person with access to the zeo port can get access to anything in zope regardless of security settings.
Does it make a difference with dual processor servers?
sure, but to make good use of smp you need to keep each python process bound to a particular processor. How to do that depends on the OS. -- Paul Winkler http://www.slinkp.com Look! Up in the sky! It's THE FEDORA! (random hero from isometric.spaceninja.com)
On Sun, Oct 19, 2003 at 08:51:36AM -0400, Paul Howell wrote:
Do you run ZEO on standalone boxes? What are the advantages?
Yes, infact I think running Zope & the storage server together in the same process should be deprecated, then done-away with. One big advantage is you can run the processes under different users to provide additional security partitioning. Then there's all the other benefits other folks have mentioned about it being faster to restart, etc. Paul Winkler wrote:
- you must take care to protect the zeo port. A sufficiently knowledgeable person with access to the zeo port can get access to anything in zope regardless of security settings.
ClientStorage and the storage server support communication over UNIX domain sockets. When the zope client & storage server processes are running on the same host it makes a lot of sense to take advantage of that, its faster, and it safer. -- Jamie Heilman http://audible.transient.net/~jamie/ "Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass." -Frank Zappa
Paul Winkler wrote at 2003-10-19 14:16 -0400:
On Sun, Oct 19, 2003 at 08:51:36AM -0400, Paul Howell wrote:
Do you run ZEO on standalone boxes? What are the advantages?
- zope restarts faster
This is not always true... My non-ZEO setup usually uses 6 s to restart (because most shared objects and "pyc" files are in the OS file cache). My ZEO setup today needed more than 1 minute to verify the ZEO client cache. The complete startup was more than 10 times longer than the non-ZEO startup. Dieter
I've enjoyed (and benefitted) from the discussion of ZEO... thanks to all. In short, I'll be continuing to run this machine with Zope behind Apache but no ZEO. However, I'll likely be running ZEO in front on our next dual processor machine, if needs warrant it. =Paul
participants (7)
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Andreas Jung -
Anthony Baxter -
Dieter Maurer -
Jamie Heilman -
Paul Howell -
Paul Winkler -
Thomas Uttenthaler