[Zope] Building Zope w/ Sun Forte (rather than gcc)

[Tony McDonald]

On Friday, November 30, 2001, at 08:13 PM, Paul Horbal wrote:

> Has anybody attempted to do this?
>
> I'm finding that even though I specify CC, CXX, put the Forte 
> directories ahead of /usr/local/bin in my path, Python is still falling 
> back on gcc to build Zope.  Where can I modify this behaviour?
>
> Our Sun rep tells us that we can kiss performance goodbye using gcc...  
> Since we have Forte anyways, I'd like to try it out.
>
> thanks,
> Paul.

Good luck Paul - there are some issues with python under sun hw and/or 
solaris, which inevitably lead to issues with Zope.

#1: speed: the pystone benchmark on our enterprise 3500 (400 MHz 
Ultrasparc) is about 4500 (using gcc compiler). My TiPB using MacOS-X 
gets 6500 and a PIII/700MHz gets over 10,000. This has lead to me trying 
to use ZEO on our system (which has multiple processors), but I ran up 
against a problem using CoreSessionTracking needing a mountable storage 
that I couldn't get my head around.

Don't get me wrong - all our Zope systems work (although I'm getting 
python2.1 core dumps which are *maddening*).

#2: threading: Zope is a multi-threaded beast and this allows it to 
handle more than one request at a time. This does not seem to  work 
under Solaris. Check the archives for "threading, dtml and performance". 
Here's a URL from NIPltd
http://zope.nipltd.com/public/lists/zope-
archive.nsf/47ba74c812dbc5dd8025687f0024bb5f/ebe6af5e2cd7b04780256af1002b7440?
OpenDocument&Highlight=0,threading
and one from Activestate
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/search?query=threading&type=Archive_zope-List
Try out the script that Oliver Erlewein posted and see what happens on 
your own Solaris box.

What seems to indicate 'good' threading is if you get this kind of 
output from

155[8:22]tonymcd@localhost ~ % python 
/usr/local/lib/python2.1/test/test_thread.py
creating task 1
task 1 will run for 1.9 sec
creating task 2
task 2 will run for 4.6 sec
creating task 3
task 3 will run for 3.0 sec
creating task 4
task 4 will run for 2.6 sec
creating task 5
task 5 will run for 8.8 sec
creating task 6
task 6 will run for 9.3 sec
creating task 7
task 7 will run for 0.8 sec
creating task 8
task 8 will run for 8.8 sec
creating task 9
task 9 will run for 0.9 sec
creating task 10
task 10 will run for 4.0 sec
waiting for all tasks to complete
..etc...

whilst solaris gives

201[8:25]tone@solaris-box ~ > python 
/usr/local/lib/python2.1/test/test_thread.py
creating task 1
creating task 2
creating task 3
creating task 4
creating task 5
creating task 6
creating task 7
creating task 8
creating task 9
creating task 10
waiting for all tasks to complete
..etc...

I have done the following to try and sort this out.

#1 built a python 2.2b as that mentions problems with Solaris threading 
may have improved. It does to an extent, in that this happens;

202[8:26]tone@solaris-box ~ > python2.2-thread 
/usr/local/lib/python2.2/test/test_thread.py
creating task 1
creating task 2
task 1 will run for 1.0 sec
creating task 3
creating task 4
creating task 5
task 3 will run for 9.1 sec
creating task 6
creating task 7
creating task 8
task 5 will run for 1.3 sec
creating task 9
task 2 will run for 1.6 sec
creating task 10
waiting for all tasks to complete

but Zope is not (yet) compatible with python2.2 (quite reasonable as 
python2.2 is a beta), so I have no way of checking it.

#2 grabbed (what I think) is the relevant parts of the 2.2 source tree 
and built a hybrid 2.1 python. That didn't work.

#3 inserted time.sleep(0.01) calls anywhere I could see a thread_create 
(can't remember the exact method) call in a clean 2.4.1 Zope 
installation and used the python2.1 from #2. That didn't work.

#3 installed a whole host of Solaris patches on a spare Solaris 8 box 
that even remotely mentioned threads, built a clean python2.1, zope 
2.4.1 and tried that out (that was my Friday night high-jinks - 
woo-hoo). That didn't work either.

(this is starting to sound like the Monty Python 'cardboard box in the 
road' sketch).

So, I'm at a loss here. I may well be doing something unutterably 
stupid, but I'm not too sure that I'm not.

I also wouldn't believe the Sun guy, sometimes they are *so* smug. A 
combination of getting threading and CST via an external file storage 
working (I freely admit I'm at fault on the latter) would increase our 
throughput by a conservative factor of 24 (4 threads * 6 processors), so 
come on board!.

I'd be interested in seeing what a Forte compiled python was capable of. 
If it has threading sorted out and is just a few %-age points faster 
than gcc-built python, I'd *really* like to download it!.

Not a lot of help I know, but it's better you know the tiger whose tail 
you're tweaking, no? :)

hth,
tone