[Web-SIG] FastCGI (previously "A query for hosting providers")

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 12:00 AM 4/1/05 -0800, Shannon -jj Behrens wrote:
> > In theory FastCGI is the way to do all of this, but despite my
> > best efforts I can never get it to work.  Well "best efforts" might
> > indicate more work than I've actually put into it, but enough effort to
> > leave me thoroughly annoyed ;)
>
>Perhaps off topic, I added FastCGI support to Aquarium in the last
>release.  If you'd like, you can steal the code.  Here are the docs:
>
><http://aquarium.sourceforge.net/api/public/aquarium.wsadaptor.FastCGIAdaptor.FastCGIAdaptor-class.html>

Perhaps even further off topic, I'll second Ian's comment that getting 
FastCGI set up is a royal pain, especially if you are having Apache start 
the processes.  mod_fastcgi has quite a few poorly documented and 
half-broken options that interact with each other in bizarre ways.  The 
situation is somewhat better if you start the processes yourself, as then 
you only have to deal with a handful of poorly-documented timeout/retry 
parameters.  :)  PEAK's "FastCGI supervisor" tool manages forking 
pre-initialized processes (and killing them off) according to a set of 
simpler, saner options.  I wrote it while at Verio so that we could 
increase performance relative to having Apache start the processes, and 
getting rid of the configuration headaches was a big plus.

Anyway, PEAK's FastCGI supervisor can run any WSGI application, so if you 
have a high-load application that needs multiple processes to take full 
advantage of your server hardware, but you don't want to have as many 
processes as mod_python would create, you should take a look at it.