Another fun success

[dormando]

Hey again,

Due to a total overload on our backend and given how well testing was 
going, we decided to give perlbal a try in production. Several hours of 
manual labor later, and it's working pretty incredibly.

I'm working out the finer points of optimization now, but it's up and 
working and our site has never loaded this fast before! I had gotten 
hitched up on a couple things with the management interface. Tracking 
how it's running is tough, but after a learning curve and some source 
diving I got the hang of it.

Right now we're working on getting HTTP 1.0 keep-alives working on our 
backend. Since it's all PHP, it really wants to use chunked encoding or 
single-shot HTTP 1.0 responses :\ The difference in speed perlbal shows 
when working without persistent backend connections is huge... 50-70% 
performance degredation, and if there're any users in the pending queue, 
it's because it's trying to get/verify a backend connection for them.

It looks like this is fixable on our end with another ~30 minutes of 
effort, but I wish I was able to hack in HTTP 1.1 support with my time 
:) It'd also be nice to more easily track how many keep-alive 
connections were reused vs connections closed. Maybe I can follow this 
up with some patches, but probably not given time constraints...

Thanks,
-Alan