It's alive!

A continuation from the weekend's entry... I actually finished the WSGI implementation in C and glued it to the AJP library I wrote. It was an interesting endeavor... programming for Python in C.

I was going to cop out and just implement wsgi.input in Python, but I went all the way and wrote that in C as well. And I'm glad too, because it's far more efficient. Data copies are greatly minimized. And data is streamed from the server. Assuming the application reads wsgi.input in decent-sized chunks, the memory usage will always remain manageable. (For example, I uploaded a 600+ MB file and hashed it. The server never used more than 2-3MB of memory.)

And from my braindead (i.e. "Hello World!") benchmarks, the server is capable of about 900 requests per second. This is a 10X improvement compared to the pure-Python server serving the same application. Not bad at all.

I'm glad to say that as far as I can tell, the server is pretty close to 100% WSGI compliance. At least, wsgiref.validate doesn't complain. One thing I haven't tested is its ability to handle erroneous WSGI applications. But I'm not sure if I'll want to do much validation (e.g. are the header names/values strings? Is the status code/reason code a string?). My goal is to make this server a production-grade server... so it will assume that your application is WSGI compliant itself.

Anyhow, still a bit of work to do. It would be nice if it was configurable somehow. Also, I should probably investigate if I can just turn it into a simple Python extension module (vs. being a C server that embeds a Python interpreter). I haven't looked how the hybrid FastCGI servers are packaged, but I'm sure it's something much more sane than the route I went.