So I’ve finally got a chance to return to working on TAAC, an access control mechanism for the web that integrates FOAF-based identification with access control rules. I’ve been doing some more thorough testing on the slow-down issues explained two posts back, and found that the slowdown, while significant, appears to be about 13 seconds or so, on average, on this server, a Linode virtual private server which I expect typifies an average web host (if not better than average).
Several attempts at profiling (aside from creating significantly increased processing times, up to 10x longer) led to the conclusion that, in fact, most of that time is spent in the second phase (post-authentication, during reasoning), which is where I’d EXPECT the slowdown to be. Granted, this now becomes a problem that can be solved in part by Moore’s Law, but even so, some speedups would be nice to allow it to be implemented today. I plan on running the same code on a relatively modern test server that’s dedicated to doing more or less supporting these tests, so it will likely run faster on there.
It’s worth considering that this is running on a variant of the cwm reasoner on top of a re-implemented Rete reasoner, and, seeing how it’s all in interpreted Python, rewriting it in compiled C code (or even Java) would probably see a significant speed-boost, but that’s not a terribly productive line of work (except where trying to actually push out a commercial product). It might also be worth exploring other reasoning approaches to improve the speed.
Even so, I’m going to try looking at the other authentication approaches to see what the benefits and costs of them are… I think the more RESTful approach without OpenID may have some arguments in favor of it, but I doubt they’re going to be based solely on speed.
