From: Kirk Haines <khaines@...>
Date: 2006-06-04T11:29:32+09:00
Subject: Re: old rumours???

On Saturday 03 June 2006 7:16 pm, Tom Allison wrote:

> rumour one:  fastcgi is better than mod_ruby for most/all websites?
> Largely because of the overhead of mod_ruby.

Maybe.  Maybe not.  The real answer will depend on one's scenario.

Is one using Rails?  Then fastcgi is probably the better choice.

Is one using something else?  Maybe fastcgi is the right choice, but maybe 
mod_ruby is fine.  Are you running many different sites and applications off 
of the same server?  I would lean more towards fastcgi or maybe a mod_ruby 
handler that dispatches requests to one or more multithreaded backend 
application processes.

Are you running a homogenous environment for an app that you intend to scale 
to many servers?  Run a thin front end that just proxies your requests out to 
a mod_ruby application instance on a server, and mod_ruby scales just fine, 
and just might be simpler to setup in that configuration than a fastcgi 
solution.

> rumour two:  rails or mod_ruby will not run under security levels (taint et
> al)

I have no idea about Rails.  SAFE levels and handling of taintedness is 
something you do in your code, though, so I know of no issues with that and 
mod_ruby.

> Is there any reason why I couldn't run an apache server with fastcgi hooks
> for both Perl and Ruby?

No reason at all.  Fastcgi is fastcgi as far as the webserver is concerned.  
It doesn't care what language the program at the end of that fastcgi pipe is.


Kirk Haines