Re: [PhillyOnRails] Rails Diatribe

[Brian McCallister <brianm@apache.org>]

On Jul 26, 2006, at 8:20 PM, Thos Styles wrote:

> I am a newbie regarding RoR, but I think that fastCGI is really a  
> "court of the last resort" dispatching
> mechanism- flexible enough, but not really intended for anything  
> too Earth-shaking, as web apps go. On the other hand, I haven't  
> seen anything like a mod-ror.dll  to link with Apache that would do  
> a better job of it (haven't looked too hard). If such a beast  
> existed, then requests could be parsed
> by URL, and filtered on the basis of some constant URI path element  
> string or file extension, eg:

mod_ruby exists, but it isn't a good option for any high load app as  
it requires pre-fork, the ruby VM is not thread safe. This means a  
ruby VM per process, which starts to eat memory *very* quickly.

FastCGI is a kinda weird, but very reasonable protocol for this kind  
of front-end <--> app server communication. FastCGI has a bit of a  
bad rap in the RoR world because folks have tried to use the very  
unmaintained mod_fcgi with Apache 2.0, which it compiles against, but  
doesn't work very well against. The much better mod_fcgid does a  
great job, and the upcoming mod_proxy_fcgi should be great.

You could do a shared-memory or domain socket multiplexing a la  
mod_perl, but no one has really wanted to do a new mod_ruby which  
supports that. Wouldn't be awful to do, but mod_fcgid, mod_scgi,  
mod_proxy_http to mongel or lighttpd (which then uses fcgi) all work  
well -- as does Apache 1.3 and mod_fcgi (if it lacks the features,  
scaling ability, and niceness of apache 2.0/2.2). If I had the time  
I'd probably be all over doing worker-mpm compatiible mod_ruby, but  
alas -- scgi (less efficient, but simpler than fcgi) serves my needs  
fine, so other itches get scratched.

Anyway, my 2p on it. If mongrel would support http keepalives... oh  
well. If you are using mod_proxy to a local http instance it should  
be fine :-)

-Brian
_______________________________________________
talk mailing list
talk@phillyonrails.org
http://lists.phillyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/talk