[Zope] Re: Threading, dtml and performance?!

[Tony McDonald]

On 7/11/01 2:20 pm, "Oliver Erlewein" <oerlewein@gmx.de> wrote:

> Hi Tony
> 
> No, I havn't solved the problem but after restarting production (after 19
> days) I noticed that the funny way the threadcount reacted. I'd say, that the
> threads don't get killed after they have finished. I also noticed that the
> memory use went down from 344Mb to about 26Mb. Now I've put a restart into my
> nightly cronjob. (Are there some reasons why  Zope should not be restarted
> dayly?????)
> 

Not that I'm aware of. I know some people do restart their servers daily. I
had thought about doing that when I had *massive* memory bloat on a machine
with a small amount of memory. However, we now have a machine with more
memory, but the problem disappeared with a new zope release (could have been
as early as the 2.2 series I think, I can't be sure though).

> I've just tested the whole thing on a WinNT 4.0 PC with Zope 2.4.2 (binary
> distribution). No problems! The PC gets slower but can answer two browser
> instances parallel.
> If I do the same thing on Solaris (intel & sun servers!) it is impossible!

I've not tried on Intel Solaris, just Sparc. You're absolutely right though,
nothing I have tried so far has enabled me to get more than one thread at a
time serviced under a Solaris server.

> Normally you have sortof a break in a loop where control is given to the other
> parallel threads. This seems not to happen on my source compile with
> Solaris. I'm not so firm on where to address this problem (or if the problem
> was 
> already adressed elswhere e.g. python maillists).

I've brought it up on the main python list. Some people responded with
suggestions and one person said they would try to get some threading fixes
into a python 2.1.2 release. However, I grabbed some of the source code from
the python 2.2b1 release (which gives test_thread.py output similar to that
on my MacOS-X machine - which *does* service more than one thread) and
compiled up a 2.1 hybrid python that gave some similar output to that of my
MacOS-X and Solaris 2.2b1 python. I then built a 2.4.1 release from source,
using this hybrid python and *still* found that I could only service one
thread at a time.

I don't know if I'm doing anything wrong or what, my knowledge of python
innards is virtually nil. I don't know if I've linked against the right
thread libraries or what.

> Therefore I'd really
> apreciate some help! ;-) I don't want to start thinking about a migration
> Linux or
> even (puke) Windows.

Same here... :(

> 
> On Solaris I'm still using 2.4.0. Does it make sense to upgrade? I've seen
> that in Zope 2.4.3b1 there was some issue with dtml-recursion?

I've had some core dumps from 2.4.0, but not had time to do a 'big M' on
them to see what's happening. We are also running 2.4.1, I've no plans to
upgrade any further for the time being. The thread issue does not go away
with Zope 2.4.1 though :(

> 
> Greetings from a rany Cologne!
> Oliver
> 

And a cold Newcassle!
Tone.
-- 
Dr Tony McDonald,  Assistant Director, FMCC, http://www.fmcc.org.uk/
The Medical School, Newcastle University Tel: +44 191 243 6140
A Zope list for UK HE/FE  http://www.fmcc.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/zope