SyK

I probably only just scrape into their concept demographic here but shouldn't we be?

I don't view increasing optimism as odd given that if all goes well, it won't be long before we're clearing out the last of the aged hubris running everything as it stands.

Then we'll be dealing with populations that are equally "socially liberal, technologically savvy and wildly optimistic" and finally able to take advantage of those facts to further our goals and those of humanity as a whole.

Is "economics be damned" and increasing optimism really that out there as an attitude when we're (in general, at least) more willing to accept alternative meanings of 'good' or 'happy' than any of our elders and this progress is nearing year by year? I wouldn't think so. And yes, I'm optimistic. Probably moreso every year...

(Edit: PS. I think this is more related to hacking than it seems. I think a lot of our tech savvy and liberal ideals are going to come into play and boost progress rates further. In particular imagine fields like biotech where barriers from aging ideals and prejudices will hopefully start to come down over those coming years)

Why haproxy? I've always seen it as more of an incoming traffic choice, and actually use it in front of nginx clusters in some cases, this seems confusing.

I don't know about anyone else but I used to use lighty and followed the path I think most people would: Learning Apache, as it's a default, then using something faster to serve static files and proxy to Apache for content (Lighty, briefly), then experimenting with proxying directly to code with things like scgi, etc.

I was at this point, playing with Lighty as an alternative, when nginx first starting poking its head about.

After trying one installation of it, it was so much quicker and smoother that I basically instantly ditched any ideas of bothering with much else. Then you start running sites with any real traffic, where it's more stable than anything I've ever seen, with no real effort and it makes the amount of bs that goes into lighty look ridiculous.

So I guess "the story" is it targets the same niche, and it's better. Bonus being that the deeper you go or the heavier into that niche you are, the wider the margin is.

This is my exact approach for dozens of tiny internal / "glue layer" HTTP servers, all over the place, for a long time now.

It's brilliant. Almost effort-free and insanely fast, in most cases.

It offers a really cool path too, in nginx + Py -> nginx + Py/C -> nginx + C plugin, to grow from a quick throw-together prototype to something that will take as much load as you can make up with silly benchmarking tools, while development takes a sensible route.

Edit: As a cool more concrete example, I used this trick to build a very quick 'hardware access layer' for an embedded device when it was insisted that Flash be used for the UI. It was 99% Python but with nginx to serve static files and proxy the rest to Flash, and CherryPy as an access layer to a local SQLite DB for data, with Python C calls to proprietary hardware drivers for the device.

Sounds sloppy perhaps but for what it had to do and how well it runs it was incredibly quick and painless to put together.