[LLVMdev] Proposal: REST and Ajax in LNT

[Chris Matthews]

I don’t want to block progress on this because of a bug on the llvm.org <http://llvm.org/> LNT server.  That just needs to be fixed. 

I don’t think the issues of scale are a problem with LNT inheriently.  We run a private LNT server instance on smaller hardware that is running 5X the amount of work the llvm.org server is.  It has very good uptime and no request failures, in fact I would say it could still handle 10x the load it is running at right now, maybe even 20x.  In the past we have had issues with bad workloads breaking the server, and if you sit down and have access to the logs and the running server it take almost no time to sort the issue out.  The llvm.org <http://llvm.org/> LNT server has a bug with long running requests, and that needs to be fixed.

I agree that we should be careful with the queries and number of requests.  But I think in the long run this would provide a net win. We can start to build interfaces that don’ t need to pull as much data out of the database. Lots of short fast requests.  In LNT we have consistently made the tradeoff of presenting all the data, since breaking up requests requires far more complicated interface design.  With these apis, we can start to undo that mess!


> On Jun 30, 2015, at 2:09 PM, Renato Golin <renato.golin at linaro.org> wrote:
> 
> On 30 June 2015 at 19:53, Chris Matthews <chris.matthews at apple.com> wrote:
>> I think it would be super useful to give LNT a RESTful interface.  As LNT
>> grows, it would be nice to be able to update some of the pages with Ajax(or
>> json).  Especially for pages with long load times, it makes sense to be able
>> to speed up load times, by fetching the data after page load. It would also
>> allow us to build more dynamic pages, and allow non-web clients better
>> structured access to LNT information.
> 
> Hi Chris,
> 
> As to what technology we use, I'm not particularly fussy, but REST can
> be a double edge sword, especially if your server is already fully
> loaded, like LNT.
> 
> I'm not against it, by all means, I do believe it's the simplest and
> most efficient of web interfaces, particularly for dynamic websites
> like you propose. But we need to solve the stability problem first, or
> REST+Ajax will only make it worse.
> 
> It may get the bare page quicker, but it will also load the server for
> longer, and multiply the number of database connections to the server,
> which is our main problem.
> 
> Once we solve the slow queries problem, and increase the number of
> concurrent connections to a limit that we know we can handle, I'm all
> up for using whatever RESTful technology you like. :)
> 
> cheers,
> --renato

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