It looks like all kinks with Django on Dreamhost were worked out. Of course, I am referring to MySQL problem (see my previous post ) and strange stalling of long pages, which I reported to Django’s mailing list . It turned out that other people had these problem too. Jason McBrayer shared his experience . He pointed out to possible flup /fcgi.py problem. I contacted Allan Saddi — the author of flup and other Python libraries and utilities . He came to help immediately. We were able to isolate the problematic piece of software and in no time Allan made a fix.

It looks like the problem is solved. Django creates one (1) connection to database and reuses it to handle requests. Multithreaded FastCGI creates threads to handle requests. These threads make requests to MySQL, which gets confused and loses its cool^H^Honnection. This process is random and compounded with multiple web requests at the same time. For example, if Google Web Accelerator decided to prefetch some pages, your web site would be hosed.

I complained about instability of this site in my previous post . Now, after intensive googling, it looks like it may be related to multiple threads or forked processes using the same connection to MySQL. Apparently it can confuse MySQL. Children should create their own connections after spawning.

If Django does reuse connections, it may be possible to fix it. Otherwise, CGI is the way to go. The latter solution would be slow.

I am totally at loss. I am getting weird errors like this:

OperationalError: (2013, 'Lost connection to MySQL server during query')

They are pretty much random but fairly frequent. Apparently it may be caused by different MySQL timeouts, which I cannot control. It seems that in order to combat those you have to call connection.ping() periodically to reconnect. I added them to Django’s MySQL handler and … now I am getting these errors during execution of connection.ping()! Bizarre!

New design is here. Well, some elements of it. I had bigger ideas, but CSS didn’t work reliably, and JavaScript option was in debugging mode. So I decided to update this site now and add other planned stuff later.

One reason I postponed JavaScript thingy is I want to try Dojo . It looks like a good foundation for widgets. I am going to create a couple of them at least. If it works okay, I’ll be using it in other projects as well. Stay tuned.

New design is coming along nicely. Thank heaven for Photoshop, POV-Ray, and digital cameras! I need to work out a few quirks and I’ll be ready to create Django templates. Additionally I’ll create some custom tags to handle non-traditional formats.

Update (3/13/2011): this article is obsolete now and preserved here mostly for its historic value. Nowadays I use Dojo’s dijit.Editor as a WYSIWYG HTML editor — it is more functional and much simpler to setup and extend. Read all gory details in Using Dojo Rich Editor with Django’s Admin .

I decided to add a WYSIWYG editor to my admin portion of the site. Apparently you can find some nice open source WYSIWYG editors nowadays. Probably FCKeditor, Xinha and TinyMCE are the most prominent ones. Some people already tried different editors with Django, e.g., Xinha — http://www.socialistsoftware.com/?p=10 , TinyMCE — http://www.socialistsoftware.com/?p=8 . Now it’s my turn.