Running Mortimer via Gunicorn and Nginx

[ctreffe]

On our university servers, we have been running into some wsgi issues, lately. When the general network traffic is heavy (i.e., 10:15 AM, 12:15 PM, 14:15 PM on the first two weeks of courses in every semester), the alfredo3 server randomly responds with Code 503 to simple staticfile requests, which causes both mortimer and alfred experiments to malfunction.

Tracking this issue, I have come to the conclusion that these issues occur when the network is very busy, but are likely caused by apache or wsgi configuration issues. Since monitoring and debugging of apache and mod_wsgi is causing considerable headache for me and as I have wanted to test alfred with nginx for a long time, I propose a new server stack for delivering alfred experiments via mortimer, which is described in more detail in this tutorial:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-serve-flask-applications-with-gunicorn-and-nginx-on-ubuntu-20-04-de

@jobrachem: What is your opinion on this?

[jobrachem]

As just discussed, I think this is a good idea. This is a nice Youtube tutorial - maybe a little dated, but hopefully the key elements are still there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goToXTC96Co