Re: Hosting oses.org (fwd)

[cg@cdegroot.com (Cees de Groot)]

Hi Aaron,

You don't need a separate Apache. Zope runs as a persistent server process, 
started up by - presumably - an rc script in /etc/init.d. Apache routes calls 
to Zope via a "Persistent CGI" script in the normal configuration - this is 
basically a lightweight CGI script (compiled C) that calls Zope and returns 
the answer. For the time being, I don't think this extra stuff will unduly 
load the machine. For high-performance Zope serving, people have reported 
success by hiding the Zope server behind Squid which eliminates a lot of the 
dynamic page generation stuff.

Another alternative, which I started with, is to have Zope running as normal, 
without Apache configuration, and let your 2.2 kernel do IP port forwarding 
from oses_ip:80 to yukon:8080 - works like a charm but you cannot easily have 
subfolders containing sites, and my experience shows that this is very 
recommendable (if you want the reasons, I'll be happy to write up another long 
mail :-))

Of course, there's also the boring old method of running Zope directly on 
oses_ip:80 (with the "-a" and "-w" options of the startup script), but I 
didn't test that (too easy ;-)). Also has the problem that you cannot redirect 
the site base URL to a Zope subfolder.

The Zope server eats something like 8Mb on my box. I think the biggest tuning 
factor here is database cache size. Memory leaks are possible, but not very 
likely because Zope is written in Python, which does garbage collection. You 
can restart Zope easily, either via a script or via a URL and I suggest that 
at least at the first few months, a cronjob handles this every night.

DNS virtual hosting is possible as well, because Apache takes the HTTP calls 
with a PCGI setup. It's all standard Apache configuration (you only throw in a 
mod_rewrite rule to redirect www.oses.org to the OSES subdirectory of Zope via 
the PCGI script, like in the mail I sent earlier).


> Lastly, oses.org is free to/encouraged to use our thttpd server to
> serve images.

No problem, although I hardly think that OSES will be very busy in the coming 
time. The only thing indeed is maintenance, one of the reasons for choosing 
Zope is that you can do everything via the HTML management screens, including 
uploading files, and can have others do this securely in a distributed 
responsibility management fashion. But, I'm quite sure that a little patch can 
be made that will drop the images automatically on the image server on upload 
via the management screens and thus make the whole thing transparent.

Bottom line: I suggest you start with the PCGI route (with DNS-based or 
IP-based virtual hosting), as long as I don't start announcing the site on 
Slashdot we'll have ample time to react on traffic increases :-).

If you have questions, please don't hesitate to bugger me (mail or phone, both 
are fine with me).

Regards,

Cees
-- 
Cees de Groot               http://www.cdegroot.com     <cg@cdegroot.com>