[Catalyst] Catalyst performance under load

[Yuval Kogman]

On Thu, Feb 09, 2006 at 10:30:13 -0000, Richard Jolly wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We've been using Catalyst for a project with much happiness. But now we
> have some hostile management questions about performance under load.
> Basically its considered new, unproven technology good for 'prototyping'
> but quite probably inappropriate for production.
> 
> So I'm asking if there is any existing data for load/stress testing, or
> anecdotal accounts of it being used for high availability/high load
> sites. I've seen the wiki page listing sites using catalyst [
> http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/ ], but I fear none of these are big enough
> to convince management.

I don't think there are any data sheets out there, but I don't
really know.

Instead I will offer this advice:

I can almost guarantee that Catalyst will *NOT* be the overhead
directly. It is much more likely that fetching the data from the
database takes 90% of your time.

If you benchmark with that apache benchmark utility and the
results are not satisfying enough you can try to employ aggressive
caching of results at their most reusable level (if an object is
used twice in two different pages, cache the object. If it's used in
only one page, cache the template output).

Worst case scenario - change your ORM, or switch to plain DBI for a
few select queries. This will allow you to do aggressive
prefetching and to spend less time transforming and accessibalizing
data.

Remember that latency and load are almost orthogonal - most of the
delay a low performance webapp might suffer from is not necessarily
high load - IO waits account for a lot of time, typically.

> We have to make a case to an unsympathetic audience - please help us
> gather evidence and arguments.

When in doubt, use mod_perl as an argument: Amazon, Yahoo (?),
Etoys - they all use Perl at least to some extent, as do many other
"serious" sites.

-- 
 ()  Yuval Kogman <nothingmuch at woobling.org> 0xEBD27418  perl hacker &
 /\  kung foo master: /me whallops greyface with a fnord: neeyah!!!!!!!

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