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

[Ian Bicking]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> 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.

Yes, it's really the Apache side that I found too difficult, not the 
Python side.  Well, honestly, I had a hard time using your FastCGI 
server last time I tried it as well -- I don't know which side was 
broken, but it was altogether more complicated than I was ready for. 
BTW, there's another FastCGI server here:

   http://www.saddi.com/software/py-lib/#fcgi

In all these cases I think it would be nice to support SCGI in addition 
to FastCGI -- it nearly the same model (at least if you are ignoring all 
the complicated FastCGI stuff like starting processes), and it's just so 
darn much easier to configure.

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org