[Grok-dev] Re: The shared hosting story, in print anyone?

[Tres Seaver]

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Sebastian Ware wrote:
> This is a blog entry about Rails and shared hosting that I believe  
> applies to Grok as well:
> 
>    http://blog.dreamhost.com/2008/01/07/how-ruby-on-rails-could-be-much-better/
> 
> If you aren't up to reading the entire blog, one of the parts caught  
> my eye. Four reasons why Rails fails in shared hosting scenarios (the  
> first three abbreviated):
> 
> """
> 1 Ruby on Rails needs to be a helluva lot faster...
> 
> 2 Ruby on Rails needs to more or less work in ANY environment...
> 
> 3 You need to maintain backwards compatibility better...
> 
> 4 Officially support shared hosting environments. The feeling I get  
> from the Rails community is that Rails is being pushed as some sort of  
> high-end application system and that makes it ok to ignore the vast  
> majority of user web environments. You simply cannot ignore the shared  
> hosting users. In my opinion, the one thing the PHP people did that  
> got them to where they are today is to embrace shared hosting and work  
> hard to make their software work well within it. That means it has to  
> be very lightweight (it may be too late for that in Rails already!),  
> and it has to ‘plug in’ to a wide variety of operating environments  
> with minimal fuss and hassle. Compatibility work like that is not  
> glamorous, exciting, or fun, but it’s gotta be done.
> """
> 
> In our case, I think we need a tutorial for shared hosting providers.
> 
>    "Installing and managing Grok in a shared hosting environment"
> 
> I have no experience of setting up shared hosting services, but maybe  
> someone here has.

It is pretty unlikely that anybody has *any* successful experience
running any Zope-based application in such a scenario:  the constraints
essentially block having a long-running process, which has been nearly
an absolute requirement (until mod_wsgi).  The constratints are alos
self-contradictory:  "go fast" and "consume minimal reesources" can't be
satisfied well at scale.  PHP manages to sustain the illusion of those
two by giving up completely on another crucial one:  "don't suck to
write or maintain."

It isn't that I'm *hostile* to the idea of running Zope-based apps on
such boxes:  I'm just skeptical.


Tres.
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Tres Seaver          +1 540-429-0999          tseaver at palladion.com
Palladion Software   "Excellence by Design"    http://palladion.com
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