Forum OpenACS Development: NetV, GAMMA, MPI, etc.

12: NetV, GAMMA, MPI, etc. (response to 7)
Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
Tom, how's your NetV stuff going? Used it for anything interesting yet?

I'm curious whether AOL has ever had their NV (NetV) became a performance bottleneck. Even using TCP/IP, it is probably faster than querying an RDBMS, although lots slower than using a local NSV in shared memory. Since they are probably using it in a query-like rather than nsv-in-an-inner-loop like fashion, my guess is it's probably fast enough.

On the other hand, if you were really hitting NetV with lots of small requests, the TCP/IP latency might bite you. In that case, GAMMA might be the answer. It supports very low latency reliable MPI over cheap Intel PRO/1000 Gigabit Ethernet cards.

That seems like one of those atypical edge cases where "enterprise" style server computing and high performance cluster computing overlap. However, offhand I can't think of any web-oriented application at all that is likely to be that latency sensitive. I'm curious whether anyone has seen one.