[Info-vax] Accuweather new contract

[David Froble]

Craig A. Berry wrote:
> 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?

I don't know that.  Nor do I know if this was one of the things he could 
not discuss.

>> 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.

All true ..

> 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.

I'd assume if using VMS then the database back end would also be on VMS. 
  I doubt they used VMS just for the web server.

> 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.

Agreed ..

>> 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.
> 

But we can be curious ..