CGI putting stack in use limitations

[Sannyasin Sivakatirswami]

Aloha,

First to Jacqueline, Rodney and Monte and every one else contributing 
in this area.

Thank you!

Question: looking through the "Intro to Rev CGI's" presentation notes 
that you did, Jacqueline, we don't see any "disclaimer"  on the the 
possible issues arising from opening stacks with huge amounts of data. 
(maybe i missed it)  libCGI is touted as "able to handle any number of 
stack and CGI's."

I presume, correct me if I am wrong, that, say if we installed rev on a 
managed dedicated server on some host's farm with only 256K RAM (yes, 
people are still running and trying to sell machines with that little 
memory!) and we were to

start using stack "tooMuchData.rev"  ## being a stack that was 500 K in 
size, which is nothing for this G4 titanium...

the server would attempt to load the full 500K of stack data into 
memory and that, we would sink the ship... am I wrong? What exactly 
would happen?

I suspect the answer is "Well of course, if you do something stupid 
like that...."

I guess the question behind the question is bigger: just how far can we 
take this... using only xTalk and not bothering with mySQL or 
PostGreSQL, forget LAMP... before we see performance problems that only 
a macho relational database can handle. but it hardly seems worth it to 
get my head wrapped around PostGreSQL when we're just try to serve up 
500-1000 K of text data. That's not a lot.

For example, a real world application that would interest us: create an 
on-line lexicon of all the words in all the books we have published by 
Himalayan Academy Publications with definitions, references "see also" 
links etc. I have few options: either build 26 html pages, one for each 
letter of the alphabet...  then, use HTDIG to index those pages and 
.... well, it's just too painful and unmaintainable... delegate this 
tedious work to some poor soul to work on for a week or two...  if the 
book editors say "oh gee, we updated these words..." then suddenly 20 
man hours of work becomes 21 hours of work... on the other hand doing 
an XML dump of each books glossary from InDesign and parsing that into 
a stack is as easy as sweet lassie (water, yogurt, honey, touch of salt 
and lime juice, two cubes of ice ;-)  put the stack on the server and 
then what... start using it and sink the ship.? OK. so, scratch my 
head. output CVS and upload to a mySQL dbase and build a rev front end 
and tell  users to download a desktop app and forget their browser... 
that also has problems... mostly the download special app resistance 
factor, aside from using a macho dbase for such a limited record set.

The cgi access to stack data with a dynamic page build response via 
browser to queries, seems so "cool" maintainable, editable,  for small 
data sets, but the challenge of loading the whole stack into memory is 
there.....

Sannyasin Sivakatirswami
Himalayan Academy Publications
at Kauai's Hindu Monastery
katir at hindu.org

www.HimalayanAcademy.com,
www.HinduismToday.com
www.Gurudeva.org
www.Hindu.org