Pike is a much further developed uLPC. It is a byte-compiled
language, that is interpreted at runtime. The Roxen Challenger
web server and the Pike language are not exactly the speed combo
for several reasons (Pike being only one of them) and like to
have loads of memory. They are not slow either, but a
performance leader is surely not written in an interpreted
byte-compiled language. I would try phttpd
(http://www.signum.se/phttpd) for a C-based ultra-fast, low
memory footprint solution that is up to the task of tackling
Zeus. Don't know how phttpd does on Linux, though: I have only
seen it on Solaris.
The Challenger excels in GUI driven configurability and in HTML
generating features. The server allows you to create your own
markup, which is interpreted at page-serving time and is
converted to HTML on the fly. This is a lot of like CFML in Cold
Fusion, only more powerful, more flexible and more reliable
under load and for free (GPLed system).
It is also recursive, that is, Challengers tags can generate new
tags which are ultimately expanded into HTML after an arbitrary
number of iterations. And Challenger allows you to define
container tags which conditionally expand to HTML. Both of this
means that the server can only deliver the first byte of a page
after the last byte of a page has been handled (actually, after
the last byte in a defined container has been handled). As you
may easily imagine, this system introduces potentially large
latencies (think SQL querying tags that build large TABLE
structures), which surely is going to ruin your benchmarks, but
is just great when you need to design dynamic content.
The Challenger server may not be the performance leader, but it
surely redefined comfort with regard to configuration and web
design. It is also great for separating page layout and page
content.
There are a bunch of very expensive, very powerful tools built
upon the GPLed Roxen Challenger Webserver. These form the Roxen
Platform, a commercial product. If you need a publishing system
product or support for your GPLed webserver, this is very much
the way to go.
>I wouldn't be surprised if Challenger has really good benchmarks, given how
>good Spinner was for its time :-)
Given enough memory, Challenger has okay benchmarks that are
solid under load. Due to the construction of the system,
Challenger will never be performance leader - that is okay, too,
because the other features of the system are well worth that
price.
After all, serving speed is a problem that can be solved by
buying a larger iron, too. Creating and maintaining content in
time is the much harder problem in most cases, and this is where
the Roxen Platform really shows its strengths.
Kristian
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