Django + Jetty + SPDY = blazing fast!!!

Kiersten Goza · Dec. 28, 2012

Django + Jetty + SPDY = blazing fast!!!

SPDY Potentiality to Optimize Loading Times

During November 2009 a new open network protocol called SPDY was defined in a first draft; the main goal of this new protocol was to reduce the latency during web page loading. The achievement of the technical specifications must comply with certain requirements: minimize deployment complexity; avoid the need of any changes to content by website developers so that the only changes required to support SPDY are in the client user agent or in the web server application.

Who supports SPDY

Recently IETF HTTP-bis working group has announced that the first draft of HTTP 2.0 is based on SPDY protocol drafts. During the evolution of SPDY many of most famous web servers implement, as an experimental feature, this new protocol. Web servers like Jetty, Apache (via mod_spdy), node.js and nginx, to name a few.

Why Can't Python Web Framework support SPDY natively?

PEP-333 defines WSGI specification as a standard interface between the web server side and the application / framework side for Python web development. WSGI doesn’t support SPDY natively so the protocol cannot be used with Python web frameworks like Django.

Django and Jython: prepare for Jetty

While waiting for an evolution of the current WSGI implementation, it is still possible to set up some technologies in order to serve a Django application with Jetty as web container in order to take advantage of Jetty SPDY and SPDY push support. To achieve this goal it’s necessary to use Jython, a Java implementation of Python language. Steps below define how to configure a Django instance inside Jetty with SPDY push feature enabled.

Download and install the stable version of Jython (currently 2.5.3). Even if it’s possible to create and develop the Django application using a traditional Python virtualenv, you need to create a new virtualenv with Jython interpreter during deployment phase.

The use of Django ORM is a common problem that needed to be solved in order to run Django inside Jython. This is caused by database backends that depend on libraries written in C language. To overcome this it’s necessary to install django-jython module so it is possible to use some useful tool together with all zxJDBC backends. Unfortunately the currently released version of module (1.3.0) doesn’t have a working support for Django 1.4. However it’s possibile to use the latest available version in the official repository (actually use changeset e2c6ff29cd01) that includes some bug fixes and a good Django support. To enable django-jython module it’s necessary to edit database backends and Django.

INSTALLED_APPS:

DATABASES = {
   'default': {
   'ENGINE': 'doj.backends.zxjdbc.postgresql',
   [...]
   }
}

INSTALLED_APPS = (
   [...]
   'doj',
)

This will enable some extra features like the capability to create a war package directly from manage.py within Jython, the Django framework, the desired JDBC driver (an include java lib parameter should be used) and the developed application.

Deploy Django on Jetty

Jetty version 8.1.8.v20121106 stable was used in this setup. Without any further configuration it is possible to deploy the war package as usual to have Django up and running.

Django, Jetty and SPDY

To serve a web page with SPDY protocol it’s necessary to add ‘spdy’ in OPTIONS parameter inside start.ini file. Then jetty-spdy.xml configuration file should be used. As defined by SPDY protocol if SPDY over HTTPS (TLS) is used, the Next Procol Negotiation (NPN) library is required. The JVM should be started with non-standard option:

java -Xbootclasspath/p:<path_to_npn_boot_jar>

Version of library in use is npn-boot-8.1.2.v20120308.jar. At this point Jetty can serve your application with SPDY support.

Django, Jetty, SPDY. Time to PUSH!

Thanks to Jetty and its SPDY implementation it is possible to use server push to reduce the number of client requests. To enable transparent push feature a pushStrategy should be activated inside Jetty configuration file. To improve the behaviour of a push strategy two variables must be set:

define a delay after which Jetty will stop to load in push mode associated resources of a main request;

define the maximum associated resources of a main request that can be pushed. Over this cap the remaining resources are sent using SPDY without push. After this configuration Django will be served using SPDY-PUSH feature.

To sum up!

Even if this view is optimized to emphasize SPDY potentiality, below we list the average load time of this Django page served by Jetty:

HTTP (1.1): 7,63 seconds
SPDY/3: 1,71 seconds
SPDY/3 (with push): 1,55 seconds

Collected values refer to a preliminary test run locally with a 200ms round trip delay and it isn't a benchmark of real use cases.

Source code

Project code, war package and Jetty configuration: https://bitbucket.org/evonove/django-spdy/

References