[Info-vax] Accuweather new contract

[Craig A. Berry]

On 3/28/15 1:52 PM, David Froble wrote:
> Jess Goodman wrote:
>
>> "...bottlenecks and performance problems that were introduced when
>> the data had to be replicated..."  The obvious but unanswered
>> question is:  Why did this data have to be replicated in the first
>> place?  The answer: because there was no webserver for VMS that could
>> scale to anywhere near the performance capacity that AccuWeather
>> required.

> I'd also wonder at just what "performance capacity" is required, or
> currently in use at for instance AccuWeather?  Why would the WASD web
> server not satisfy that demand?  Not saying it should, just asking where
> it might not.

How do you know they didn't evaluate WASD and found that whatever
performance advantages it offered over Apache weren't enough compared to
what they could get with other web servers on other platforms?

> With sufficient specifications, I cannot see why a web server could not
> be implemented on VMS to satisfy any requirements.  Even a large cluster
> running multiple copies of the web server to meet the volume of
> connection requests.  (No, I haven't volunteered to write such.)

Consider how many VMS-related performance disadvantages have been
reported here, including network slowness, possibly at the ethernet
level as well as the TCP/IP stack, file I/O slowness, and the fact that
ten years ago Itanium was barely starting to catch up with where Alpha
had ended a few years previously, both in cpu and memory bandwidth.

Consider also that the problem may not have been between the web server
and web clients but between the web server and the database back end,
where the necessity of using socket communication instead of named pipes
or Unix domain sockets might well have given a poor showing.

Some of these things may have been mitigated in the 8.3 and 8.4 releases
of VMS and more recent hardware, but there is likely still a great deal
of work to be done to make VMS a high-performing web server platform.

> Also, you cannot solve a problem, unless you know what the problem is.
> I'd be curious as to where and why VMS based web servers do not satisfy
> the requirements?

Me too, though he did say he couldn't go into more detail in this forum.