Migrate to Uvicorn or Gunicorn

[yatesdr]

I've been using MediaCMS as a back-end for hosting educational content in Canvas LMS, and as the user base has ramped up, uwsgi was causing a bunch of issues with scaling for me. It was okay (but a bit laggy) until the simultaneous user count moved north of about 30. Adjusting processes, threads, and workers did help some with uwsgi and kept it rolling, but moving the install to Uvicorn or Gunicorn has been far more stable for me recently, eliminating the WSGI bottlenecks. There are still of course bandwidth limitations, but the site's not falling apart under load now at least. My production instance is currently running on Gunicorn and tested to 100 simultaneous users with acceptable site responsiveness.

The symptoms I was getting with uwsgi were primarily intermittent 'bad gateway' and slow loading times during peak usage, while the machine was basically idling (8 cores, 8g, 10gbe), and I believe were partially related to the default 2-process setting in uWSGI with no threads.

I'm expecting to have > 100 simultaneous users in the near future, and have been testing both Uvicorn and Gunicorn[gevent] for scaling to that level on the current server, and my opinion is that they both work well and are better suited for this particular application than uwsgi is at this point, and there's no real down-side for smaller installations or private hosts.

Are you open to this? If so I can prepare and submit a patch for nginx and service files, but if you have some other reason for still using uwsgi would like to discuss.

[mgogoulos]

Hi, I've been using both uwsgi and gunicorn on multiple projects and have no preference. Moving to gunicorn would be ok, but as long as we've identified that this has actually been a bottleneck (which is the case as you describe). Feel free to open a PR and we can discuss there!

[yatesdr]

Will do - I've found the best success in testing using Gunicorn + gevent, and will start work on a branch with that as the default WSGI approach. The next big wave of simultaneous users will likely occur late next week, and if no issues are found during that session I'll submit it for review.

I shifted away from the docker install due to recurring problems with intermittent task scheduling causing lockup in the web-ui, I'm wondering if it's possibly related to this as well now and will spend some time on it to see if I can track down whatever the root cause was there.

[WaiserHai]

any updates ?

[yatesdr]

any updates ?

What are you looking for? Gunicorn + gevent work very well with minimal changes, I’ve been running them on prod and it did resolve my issues under load. I don’t plan to submit a PR as the last few haven’t been accepted so am just maintaining a separate branch that works for what I need, which is a bit different than the typical users I believe.

Happy to share anything if it will help you out in some way, I’ve had it reliably serving private backend video on canvas for about 70 simultaneous users without any issues, but did make a number of changes including gunicorn, reverse proxy, some package upgrades, CDN support, the install script and css modifications to de-feature the video player. All are available in my fork if you want to browse them but honestly it diverged quite a bit from the direction the base branch was taking, and PR’s were kind of left unaddressed while other features were being prioritized.

Some of my “needs” are eliminating functionality that most people would probably want, like sharing videos, overlays, and auto-play, so it’s a bit of a pain to backtrack those features to submit a clean PR for minor things like gunicorn that most people don’t need. I’ve been considering forking specifically for Canvas integration and writing an LTI to fully replace Kaltura but time hasn’t allowed yet.