Re: Open questions on Snowy deployment

[Jeff Schroeder <jeffschroeder computer org>]

On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 8:17 AM, Brad Taylor <brad getcoded net> wrote:
> Hey Jeff,
>
>> >> 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.
>>
>> Well didn't knuth say premature optimization was the root of all evil?
>> Lets see if we actually have any performance problems and how many
>> users sign up for tomboy online before setting up something exotic
>> like memcached. Does snowy use the django cache middleware? If not,
>> that might be a good start. Sorry I've not had a chance to poke at the
>> snowy code. Real life has gotten more busy than I'd like recently.
>
> Snowy doesn't do any caching right now, but Django caches QuerySets, and
> Piston, one of the libraries we use, throttles connections by storing a
> token via the cache, so we'll need to enable Django's caching framework
> somehow.  Django can support db, filesystem, local-memory, as well as
> memcached backends.
>
> I strongly encourage setting up memcached.  I refute your argument that
> it is "exotic"; it's used by many of the top websites, it's surprisingly
> light on dependencies and very high-performance.  Setup is also quite
> simple.

Perhaps my comments could have been rephrased as, "Setting up
memcached seems unnecessary at this point in time. If it it necessary
at a later time it shouldn't be a lot of work to setup. Tomboy online
will likely not receive the amount of traffic as facebook or
danga/livejournal who have a genuine need for memcached"


> That said, filesystem cache could work also.  *Do not* use local-memory
> caching if you're running Apache with mpm-worker, as the cache will be
> per-worker process and break the fundamental semantics of Django
> caching.
>
> Best,
>
> -Brad

Thanks for the tips

-- 
Jeff Schroeder

Don't drink and derive, alcohol and analysis don't mix.
http://www.digitalprognosis.com