[Zope-dev] Streaming Response

[Oliver Bleutgen]

Shane Hathaway wrote:
> 
> Here's a better alternative: when you can, avoid caching altogether. For 
> example, if you're storing files using Ape, stream the data directly 
> to/from the filesystem.  In fact, when sending a file, the server could 
> close the database connection, freeing up precious database threads, and 
> let asyncore stream the rest of the data from the file.
> 
> To do this, we'd need minimal support from the application.  OFS.File 
> needs to delegate the specifics of data storage and retrieval to a 
> subobject.  Ape could take the opportunity to replace that subobject 
> with something that reads and writes the file directly.

Maybe this could include the possibility to not serve the file via 
ZServer at all. I did a small patch to ExtFile for that. If the file 
object is accessed via zope, it returns a redirect to a computed 
location where then the file is served from apache.
I think there are a lot of use cases for that, even if ZServer's 
performance isn't considerably worse than e.g. apache's.
You might want to stream multimedia files with a streaming server but 
manage them in zope, there might be cases when ZServer's http 
implementation is not up to the task, as it was with pdf a while ago 
IIRC. Maybe this would also help with certain quirks in some WebDAV 
implementations where apache might have a workaround, but ZServer has 
not (yet).

cheers,
oliver