Suitability of Python for daemon processes

[Matt Domsch]

On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 06:14:14PM -0400, Ben Boeckel wrote:
> My team and I would like to know whether the community would be accepting of
> such a project (which includes a daemon) if it were written in Python rather
> than C or C++.

No problems here, MirrorManager includes several daemon processes
written in python.

The only real problem I have with python is the memory manager.  I
have to constantly think "gee, if I read this file line by line and do
something with it, will my RAM needs grow to 10-20x the size of the
file?"  And I love python on x86_64 - it makes people buy twice as
much RAM from Dell! *

So, go for it.  If it turns out that python is inefficient for parts
of the problem, you can always split those parts out.  I had to split
out the mirrorlist_server bit from the mod_wsgi app, to get the
benefits of shared pages (fork() on a 100+MB process) w/o killing
Apache with duplicate processes but no sharing.

* (no kidding: the mirrorlist_server process takes 125MB on x86_32,
250MB on x86_64.  ugh.)

-- 
Matt Domsch
Technology Strategist, Dell Office of the CTO
linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux