[hunchentoot-devel] Hunchentoot data-transfers seem slow

[Robert Synnott]

On 3/21/07, Edi Weitz <edi at agharta.de> wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Mar 2007 20:57:12 +0000, "Robert Synnott" <rsynnott at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > The function which just sent back a big file was simply:
> >
> > (defun speedtest () *big-string*)
> >
> > where *big-string* contained the contents of a 700kb text file.
>
> OK, I see.  The culprit /is/ FLEXI-STREAMS, but there's not much to do
> about it in the general case.  Its WRITE-SEQUENCE function gets a
> string and loops through it element by element calling WRITE-CHAR for
> each one in turn.  This is necessary because a) the sequences you can
> output with FLEXI-STREAMS can be almost anything, even lists or
> vectors containing a mixture of octets and characters and b) you can't
> know in advance whether you'll have encoding errors further down the
> string.
>
> I have a crude optimization for some special cases which I'll release
> one of these days, but it is just that - a crude optimization for
> special cases.
>
> To solve your problem there are at least two ways, though:
>
> 1. To output a static file you shouldn't keep the file in memory
>    anyway - use CREATE-STATIC-FILE-DISPATCHER-AND-HANDLER instead (or
>    see HANDLE-STATIC-FILE).
>
> 2. If you insist on using a variable like above and you know its
>    contents in advance, convert it to an array of element type
>    FLEX:OCTET, i.e. (UNSIGNED-BYTE 8), and let the handler return this
>    array.  (This is the only "optimization" that'll always work with
>    FLEXI-STREAMS.)
>
> In both cases, the transfer rate should be in the ballpark of Apache
> handling static files.  Let us know if it's not.
>
> HTH,
> Edi.
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>

I was really just using the big static file to demonstrate the
problem; it's visible when sending dynamically generated pages as
well, but just not by so huge a margin (because the pages aren't as
big, I think; the bigger the page, the more the speed difference
between tbnl and hunchentoot seems to be).
Rob