Re: Debugging

[Jason Pincin <chardros@linuxkb.org>]

> No, I got the "200 children of any kind".  That's what has me so
> concerned.  What is the current time out?

How long did it take for thew error to come back on sign-up?  Thats what the timeout it.  You
can find out by looking at php.ini.

> Well, let me put it this way.  We have faster CPU's than what my company
> uses for MUCH larger datasets.  I'm talking MILLIONS of records searched
> per-query.  Our query time is < 2 seconds.  Yes, we use Oracle, but I'd
> have a hard time believing that MySQL can't beat Oracle when you're
> comparing < 500 records to > 6 million.

All the scalability in the world won't help you if you have non-optimized querys.  The query
being generated on sign-up when the problem existed had over 200 "OR" statements... I'm not
sure how that would be handled... probably poorly.

> Ok, let me re-phrase that.  Rewriting this in C/C++ won't happen in time
> to help us.  Even if you stoped all PHP devel, and started on the C++
> port, you're at least 18, probably closer to 36, months away to having
> anything useful.  Not to mention everything that we have coded would be
> thrown away.

Same prob with using perl.  We'd be throwing away a lot of existing stuff.

I'm not even considering a re-write at this point.

> 1) Don't bet the farm on vapor-ware.  I know Zend is hardly vaporware, but
> we don't have the ability to test it right now, and no idea when critical
> bugs will be fixed.

I'm not betting the farm on it... I'm betting the farm on the fact that I can optimize the
code enough to get us to the point where Zend is usable for us.

> 3) You don't sound very confident that Zend will scale to meet our needs
> in the forseeable future.

Yes I am.  For the forseeable future... Zend will kill mod_perl.

> 
> 4) Other options?  My gut says, Perl as it performs well (especially with
> DB's) and is high-level enough where it won't take 3 years to develop a
> usable site.  mod_perl is known to scale very well; slashdot, internet
> movie database, Wired, and CBS MarketWatch all run mod_perl.  You might
> want to check out Mason.  http://www.masonhq.com/  From what I understand,
> kinda a Zope meets mod_perl.

A couple of things.  If I would re-write in something else, it wouldn't be perl.  It would be
Python or C/C++.  C++ or Python are MUCH more object oriented than Perl.  Plus, I know them.
And Python is just as high-level as Perl, and has proven scalability... All of Zope is
written in Python... just about.

Anyway - my point is that any re-write would kill us.  I don't think the problem is big
enough to warrant a re-write.  I think the problem is in how I wrote the functions, and I'll
be examining ti closer today.  It's not like I have to trouble shoot everything... the
object-init stuff, which is where the problem lies, is only 100 or 200 lines of code.  I'm
sure I can optimize it more.  

Al for now - more later.

-- 
Jason Pincin
Linux Knowledge Base Project Leader (http://www.linuxkb.org/)
http://vodka.linuxkb.org/~chardros/