[Zope-dev] Zope does dynamic, Linux kernel does static pages?

[Ross J. Reedstrom]

Hey Zopesters - 
Just thought I'd point out something thart came up on the linux kernel
mailing list this week. Apparently, as part of the aftermath of that 
whole Mindcraft 'benchmark' fiasco, it came to the kernel developers'
attention that under NT, IIS has special status - it has some sneaky
system calls that end up with the NT kernel effectively doing all the
serving of static HTML pages. This had been discussed some time ago as
an interesting idea under Linux, but this time around, someone started
implementing it. It's still alpha, but it's at:

http://www.fenrus.demon.nl

This being Linux, it's not specific to any one HTTP server, it'll
cooperate with anything that listens on a port. Basically, it'll handle
serving the simple static pages directly from the filesystem as fast as
possible, and pass anything else on to the userland application.

Linus Torvalds himself seems to like the idea, and mentioned:

 So you could even use a pretty much unmodified apache (or other) web
 server to do all the non-static cases - although it would probably imply
 that the user-level deamon would be better off being optimized for the
 "uncommon" case because it never sees the common case.

Hmm, a user-level deamon optimized for the "uncommon" non-static case:
do I hear Zserver calling?

Admittedly, it's still alpha, but anyone playing with Zope2 on linux
might want to look at this. To use it effectively, you'd need to use
absolute URLS to static pages (and images) outside the zope ORB, so the
module can find them.

In the long run, some sort of static 'shadow' directory structure,
perhaps managed via one of the new ORB3 alternative storage managers,
could allow the Zope developer to mark objects as 'static pages' that
get pushed out to files, so the kernel daemon could see them.  Hmm,
this might even allow Zope's cache to become accessible to the kernel
deamon? Does Zope do any caching of rendered of pages? If it did, That'd
be a speed win for 'quasi-static' things that change slowly compared
to typical user sessions. In fact, the caching would be a win no matter
how you serve pages.

My random thoughts for today,
Ross

-- 
Ross J. Reedstrom, Ph.D., <reedstrm@rice.edu> 
NSBRI Research Scientist/Programmer
Computer and Information Technology Institute
Rice University, 6100 S. Main St.,  Houston, TX 77005