Re: Inadequate hosting for www.postgresql.org?

Hi,

Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> That's why mirrors are pulled from http://www.postgresql.org, nor are
> they pulled using what I'd guess you are using ( wget? ) below, but
> using rsync ... hasn't been for years now ...
>
> In fact, over the next little while, http://www.postgresql.org will
> actually be pointing to an RR DNS entry, and not even the 'base server'
> ... I've just gotta sit down and update the DNS generation scripts for
> this ...

Uh, seems I was unclear about what I was doing.

I understand of course that the site is mirrored via rsync, but consider the
following: the site which resides in CVS is just a few PHP scripts, to have
something to rsync you first need to *generate* the static pages. And here comes
the problem: page generation is outrageously slow.

In current version special scripts are used to generate static pages, but these
are terrible hacks, f.e. you have to make the same change to design both in the
dynamic page and the mirroring script. But they maybe run in acceptable time, I
don't know, ask Dave.

For the next version I just wrote a generic mirroring script behaving like wget
but taking into account some specific needs (like i18n). The plus is that you
don't need to change this script *at all* if you add pages or even completely
redesign the site.

But now it looks as if generation of full static website will take several
hours. And no, this has nothing to do with network latency, the mirror
generation script was run locally.

Marc, page generation times of 3+ seconds are only acceptable if you do some
extremely complex database queries in them, think reports. This is definitely
*not* the case with the code of postgresql.org, my experience tells me that
modern hardware can happily churn 5-10 of such pages *per second*. Thus: either
hardware is completely inadequate or the servers are overloaded.