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Paul De Groot wrote:
> 
> One caution here: we did something similar with the most recent election in British >Columbia and our server died on election night. The server was underconfigured, to >be sure (a dec alpha with 64 MB of RAM), but I'm convinced it would have stood up >under the load better if we hadn't depended on CGI to generate all the results for >each viewer each time they wanted them.
> In otherwords, everytime someone wanted to see the candidates, the system ran a >Perl script to generate it. And on election night, every time they wanted to see the >results, the system ran a Perl script. This worked OK before the election, but on 
>election night the demand was far greater than we anticipated. With perhaps 12,000 >CGI hits in one hour, the server simply rolled over and died. CGI is far more >processor- and resource-intensive than handling http requests for static HTML pages.

That's one of the things we're going to be monitoring tonight, as the
primary results are totaled. The state is projecting a low turnout of 8
to 9 percent, which should be sufficient to generate a real-world load
for test purposes but well within the capabilities of our system. We're
giving the Sybase election database its own dual-processor Sparc20; all
of our other content resides on Sybase on another Sparc20. The web
server itself is a separate Sparc20 with 120MB of RAM. We watch CPU, i/o
and memory utilization pretty closely. (All of our daily news content
and classified advertising is served dynamically from Sybase using CGI
scripts that unite fragmentary HTML from the database with templates, so
this isn't entirely new.)

We want the CGI approach to work because it provides better service to
our users. Most people don't have any idea what legislative district
they live in -- they may know the candidates, but numbers like 55A are
meaningless. What we've done with the database is allowed them to enter
one query, using their personal addresses, that returns a personalized
list of all of the current results for candidates on their ballots --
candidates for congress, state legislature, judiciary, county offices,
combined into a single document. That should hold down the number of
transactions while presenting the most information in a tailored format.

We've discovered that symptoms can be deceptive and the performance of
the database server is crucial. If it can't return data fast enough,
queries will stack up under load and the web server will be affected --
it'll run out of memory, then out of swap. The web server will look like
it's suffered a fatal heart attack when it's really not at fault.

--
Steve Yelvington 
Editor/Manager, Star Tribune Online, Minneapolis-St. Paul
http://www.startribune.com/

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