Give it a rest + answers. (Re: [Zope] Re: Zope + Apache on Quad Debian machine)

[Dario Lopez-Kästen]

Chris Withers said the following on 2006-03-22 01:36:
> Dario Lopez-Kästen wrote:
> 
> Dario, I actually think your comment here is a bit out of order if 
> you're referring to this post of mine:
> 
> http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2006-March/165574.html
> 

yes, it was and I apologise for it, you did point to relevant 
information and I was unfair towards you.

> 
> In all fairness, the quality of newbies was better back then. Too many 
> people come to this list nowadays asking about stuff without bothering 
> to do any research and often asking about Plohn, whereas their own lists 
> would be much better...
> 
> They then get arsey because people won't bend over backwards to help 
> them answer the same question they asked before, even though they're not 
> even paying the people they're expecting to help them.

Unfortunaltey, that is the ways things work, and I think we all have to 
prepare to be nice to those newbies too. Back then, when we are a select 
"few" that used zope and zope was not so on-topic as it is today, the 
ones that were on the list were interested in Zope-the-technology and 
thus could ask sensible questions.

Generally speaking, with the growing poularity of Zope-solutions, where 
Plone and CPS being popular solutions more or less "hide" the technology 
behind, we get a bunch of people that do not necessarily care about the 
technology behind plone/cps, they just wnat things to work.

Also, especially having the "marketing zope" discussions happening on 
other lists, we need to come to terms with the fact that zope does not 
exist in isolation from it's environment. Questions on the general Zope 
list about issues and successes in deploying Zope, Zope performance 
*ARE* legitimate questions on the list.

Even if the real answer is "it's a python thing". If folks don't care 
for politeness and a will to help users, then they should see it as a 
technical issue. Zope is probably the largest Python Threaded app there 
is at the moment (perhaps the largest Python app, period?) - Zope has 
lead to bugs being discovered in Python that get fixed in newer Python 
releases.

So, questions and issues about threaded Pytohn apps are very likely  to 
be related to Zope, and shoudl not be dismissed ad-hoc-ly, in spite of 
the answer being "google is your friend: zope+multi+cpu"

>> enough sleep, yada, yada, yada... I fail to see how that is a newbie's 
>> fault, so no need to take it out on them.
> 
> It's a two way street...

Indeed, and in hindsight, I guess I reverted to this behaviour as well 
:P. Sorry about that.

>>
>> http://www.zope.org/Members/glpb/solaris/report_ps
> 
> 
> Having chatted with both the author and the researcher of that paper, I 
> don't remember the results being as clear-cut as you imply ;-)
> 

having experienced this first hand, before the paper arrived (and it did 
help me find the solution), I think I disagree :-)

> Still, had Hugo bothered to do even some cursory googling, would he not 
> have found all that information?
> 
> http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=zope+multi+cpu

I guess he was under the wrong impression that the zope-list was a 
friendly and safe place to ask questions and get community support :)

Joke aside, yes, he would have found the answer probably, but we cannot 
expect all netizens to be civilised and know proper behaviour. I think 
Checkov (or someone) said something along the lines of "good table 
manners is not to not spill sauce on the table, but to not notice when 
someone else does".

I think we could do with something similar about netiquette.

>> Regarding all other advises you have gotten so far (get more memory, 
>> look at your disks, get a life, etc), I am sure that they have merits, 
>> but as far as I can see, they don't actually solve anything at all.
> 
> 
> I think you're stepping outside the bounds of reasonable argument here...
> 
> The other advice, in fact, more often than not, has more impact on more 
> zope installations...
> 

I'd love to see more data and less opinion about this - and no, I am not 
being sarcastic here. If we can avoid taskset then the setup is *way* 
simpler for our sysadmins, so I have a real interest here.

> 
> Actually, most people run multiple zeo clients on multi-processor boxes 
> and let the native task scheduler "do the right thing". For "most 
> people" this seems to work just fine...
> 

See above.

/dario

-- 
-- -------------------------------------------------------------------
Dario Lopez-Kästen, IT Systems & Services Chalmers University of Tech.
Lyrics applied to programming & application design:
"emancipate yourself from mental slavery" - redemption song, b. marley