Preamble
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The notebook was written with the intent of being a local GUI, and as a side-effect of taking advantage of the browser, it's usable over the net. But the performance of sagenb.org is terrible since there are around 40,000 users, so we need to make the server much more scalable and robust overall. The plan is currently to tackle this during Sage Days 27.
Tasks
- Write testing code to identify bottlenecks, and generally improve robustness.
- Convert notebook data structures to a database architecture to allow for concurrent scalable access to a centralized data store by different processes.
Rewrite twist.py to use http://flask.pocoo.org/ flask. The notebook will then depend on Flask and no longer use Twisted. The main advantage to using flask is the excellent support for mod_wsgi.
Use mod_wsgi and Apache (say) to make the server scale massively.
Notes
Be aware of the sage-devel discussion.
- It is OK if the "highly scalable notebook server" has dependencies that the usual single (or small group) server doesn't have. E.g., depending on Apache and a database (like MongoDB) would be just fine, even though neither will be included in Sage.
- It is, of course, important that the notebook still have a zero configuration mode, where it works fine for a small number of users, but without any complicated dependencies.
- We are not going to shoot too high with this project. In particular, our goals do *not* include adding new authentication systems or making it easy to organize worksheets into folders, etc. We just want to solve exactly one problem: make the notebook scalable. This is of course by far the biggest bug with the Sage notebook, and it is only an issue because the notebook is used so heavily. That said, it will be useful to think through how to implement everything on the wishlist before deciding on how to implement scalability, so it is easier to implement the other features later.
A proposal for a scalable server: google docs link and discussion
People
- Tom Boothby
- Robert Bradshaw
- Jason Grout
- Mike Hansen
- Alex Leone
- William Stein
Motivation
