[Gimp-web] Netscape 4.x (was Re: anyone try the news out?)

[Raphaël Quinet]

On Thu, 3 Apr 2003 20:07:38 +0200, Simon Budig <Simon.Budig@unix-ag.org> wrote:
> Raphaël Quinet (quinet@gamers.org) wrote:
> > As I explained in my previous message, using static files can reduce
> > the load greatly.
> 
> *Does* the server suffer from high load? Are you *sure* that Gimp.org
> is the reason?

As I wrote earlier, my comparison of static files vs. dynamic files
was based on several other sites, including one that serves a very
large number of requests per day.  I cannot be more specific for the
moment, but I will check with the site owners if I am allowed disclose
the exact numbers and other details.  Anyway, I can probably say that
enabling the server-side includes increased the number of requests by
about 20% due to the fact that the dynamic pages cannot be cached as
efficiently as the static ones (so these additional 20% were simply
wasted).  The CPU usage was increased by one order of magnitude or
more, although this is not directly applicable to www.gimp.org because
some of the SSI statements contained executable code, which would not
be required for the GIMP pages.  The memory usage increased as well,
but was not measured precisely.

> (Currently I see it suffer sometimes, but the reason is usually the
> recomputation of the trust metrics of www.advogato.org)

Yes, sometimes the load on wilber is quite high, but you may be right
about the contribution of Advogato.

Anyway, I don't know to what extent the usage of SSI would affect the
load on www.gimp.org.  The only thing I know is that using SSI
requires more resources than if static pages are used everywhere, and
this difference can be quite large in some cases.  We should of course
not optimize things prematurely, but according to what I have observed
on other sites there is a risk that wilber could not cope with the
load.  This is only a risk -- maybe everything will work fine.

-Raphaël