The slides are available as HTML or the source OpenOffice.org Impress file.

Thanks to everyone who attended, and thanks to the Open Source Bridge organizers for putting on an excellent conference!

I have a bzr repository full of my log files I’m considering uploading. Unfortunately the meanings of the log files are mostly in my head, so I think I should clean them up before unleashing them on the world. Ping me by tweet or e-mail.

The full list of sessions is up (or here), and I’m very excited just to be attending the conference. Congratulations to all of the speakers!

Some of the sessions I’m particularly excited to attend are:

• An Introduction to Machine Learning by John Melesky – A Portland Python User Group regular and really smart guy in general. Looking forward to getting my feet wet with machine learning.
• Drop ACID and think about data by Bob Ippolito – I think the Portland Python crew that went to Pycon helped convince Bob to bring his presentation to OS Bridge, and I’m glad they did! I work with non-relational databases everyday, but I still design my apps with a relational data model in mind. This should be interesting.
• The Linux Kernel Development model by Greg Kroah-Hartman – Its Greg KH! Come on!
• How Idealist.org uses technology to change the world by Michel Pelletier – Another Portland Pythoneer and really smart guy. Eager to here more about open source at work in an organization. Its always fun to watch Michel present anyway.
• Web Testing with Windmill by Mikeal Rogers – Hardly a day goes by that I don’t tell myself I’m going to improve my test coverage and skills. Windmill looks like an excellent testing tool to help me accomplish that.

There are many many more sessions I’m excited about, but I’m too sick of copying and pasting to mention anymore right now.

So sign up to attend the Open Source Bridge Conference in Portland, OR this June!

Introduction to Django: The Who, What, and When

As with my other talk, Web Server Shootout, I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything. We’re all already inundated with plenty of senseless marketing and fanboyism.

I’d rather present my knowledge, experiences, mistakes, and opinions in an effort to help others make more intelligent decisions about the development platforms they choose to use.*

Let me know what you think!

*If that was dripping with too much sappy altruism, do remember I get into the conference free if either proposal gets selected.

Web server performance has been a hot topic for some time now as Apache hasn’t been the only viable option for a few years.

I want to do a talk at OS Bridge doing practical comparisons between the popular web site hosting options available today. There’s plenty of requests per second comparisons between the major HTTP servers out there, so I want to go beyond and compare a wide variety of metrics in a wide variety of environments.

Here’s what I’m thinking so far, but I’d love your feedback! I’m really excited about the possibility of presenting at a large conference like OS Bridge and want to make my talk as exciting and useful as possible.

Metrics

• Requests per second (serially* and concurrent)
• Memory usage
• Features (extensibility, modularity, etc)
• Community (support options, tools/modules available, etc)
• Portability
• Reliability (can I crash it? how well does it handle load?)
• Ease of setup and maintenance (floods of patches? hideous config file?)

Web Servers

The usual suspects (will definitely test):

• Apache 2.2 (prefork and worker mpms)
• Nginx 0.6.x (latest stable)
• Lighttpd 1.4.x (latest stable)

Maybes:

• Nginx 0.5.x (legacy)
• Nginx 0.7.x (latest dev)
• Cherokee (not sure if its really popular enough yet to bother)
• CherryPy and some other language specific or just less known servers would be fun.
• IIS – It’d be really fun if I could find someone willing to help me run my tests on IIS. I definitely won’t be setting it up myself though!

Test Cases

This is where things become really complicated. I don’t want to just download static files from each server and pretend like thats a real world use case, but at the same time the various environments I could come up with are nearly limitless.

I want to strive to cover the most common environments** as well as a few variations that produce interesting results.

• WordPress (mod-php where applicable and FastCGI)
• Drupal (mod-php where applicable and FastCGI)
• Bugzilla, Redmine, and Trac (to test a few non-trivial apps from 3 popular languages)
• trivial Django app (mod-python & mod-wsgi on Apache, FastCGI everywhere)
• trivial Ruby on Rails app (need advice from RoR devs on common deployment methods)
• trivial Zend Framework app (or is there a more popular php framework?)
• something from the Java world?
• maybe something fairly obscure like Seaside?

Conclusion

Wow, that seems like a lot to cover thoroughly, but I think the research will be a lot of fun to do.

Please let me know your thoughts either in the comments, on twitter (@schmichael), on IRC (schmichael again), or via e-mail.