Re: Open questions on Snowy deployment

[Brad Taylor <brad getcoded net>]

Hey Ray,

First off, thanks for putting in the work to get Snowy up and running on
GNOME infrastructure.  You rock!

As one of Snowy's hackers, I hope you don't mind me chiming in here:

> 1) What software stack that we prefer to use?
>     I mean (OS + web server + module + database), we have many choices.
>     OS: RHEL,  Ubuntu,  Fedora etc, but this seems not a problem, the
> server is sponsored by Redhat, so that RHEL would probably better.
>     Web server: Apache,  lightttpd,  Ngnix?

Nginx seems to be the new hotness, but I have little experience with it.
Apache may be a safer option because it's used by the rest of the GNOME
infrastructure, and more folks on this list will have experience with it
versus Nginx.

>     Module: mod_wsgi,  mod_python,  FastCGI?

mod_wsgi seems to be what everyone is using these days.  Snowy is
shipped with a wsgi configuration file, that, although has only bee
lightly tested, should get you started.

>     Database: mysql, postgresql, sqlite?

Mysql definitely.  Snowy hasn't been tested on postgres, and there may
be compatibility issues.

> 2) Should we separate the components to many servers as distributed
> architecture?
>     - static files (media server)
>     - database
>     - load balancer

IMHO, stick with one server for right now, and make sure you keep plenty
of performance stats (e.g.: requests per minute per URL, number of
queries, slow queries, etc).  When we start getting more users, then you
can find out what the slowest parts of the system are, and optimize the
stuffing out of them.  This is the biggest reason behind doing a phased
deployment (invite-only, larger invite-only, open public beta, live).

> 3) Should we use memcached as a cache server?

Yes, definitely.  Django uses cache heavily, and using the database for
this is a great way to shoot yourself in the face, performance-wise.

Best,

-Brad