[Web-SIG] Rails pushing FastCGI into megahost

[Rene Dudfield]

Nice one :)

Hopefully this will help things... I think the key is python keeping a
low memory foot print for it to be available on lots of shared hosts.

Where it uses up 0 memory if there are no requests for the site, and
maybe 5-10MB per site when there are requests.

With 50-200 sites per machine, that is 250MB- 2gigs of memory.

FCGI and python can be used with 0 memory for inactive sites... so
hopefully it catches on :)  Having support in cpanel, and other
popular control panels would be key I think.  Also having the apache
module in core apache would be good.

Here's something about FCGI + ruby on rails with cpanel.  Luckily fcgi
seems quite easy for hosts to set up with cpanel.
http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/show/HowtoInstallAndRunRubyOnRailsOnCpanel


However until the time comes when it's on 90% of hosts, I'll have to
keep doing 99% of client sites with php, and only get to use python on
my own sites.  Clients with hosts allready do not want to change. 
Even if the alternatives are cheaper, and faster.  It's just extra
work for them.





On 6/17/05, Todd Grimason <todd at slack.net> wrote:
> I think this might be of interest to some here - apparently Dreamhost
> has just rolled out support for Rails (apparently all ruby installs are
> up to date at 1.8.2 - python's up to 2.2.x) via FastCGI. [0]
> 
> I don't have an account with them these days, but it was mentioned on
> the Rails list - someone over there (and I'd guess others) had been
> asking them for it apparently. No word yet on performance or
> reliability. I suppose it could be in response to something besides
> Rails, but based on the publicity and explicit listing on their pages
> I'd say Rails was the impetus (well, the promise of $ to be made with
> it).
> 
> Anyway - point is - good news for increasing the "deployability" for
> python, ruby, perl, etc. and allowing apps to be written in langs
> besides PHP for clients who can only swing commodity shared hosts. Maybe
> someone here should petition them re: WSGI? Or maybe that's pushing
> one's luck...
> 
> [0] http://dreamhost.com/panel/features.html#ruby
> 
> --