fastcgi vs mod_perl

[Joel Bernstein]

On Wed, Jul 19, 2006 at 04:19:46PM +0100, Dirk Koopman wrote:
> Has anyone done any benchmarking of fastcgi vs mod_perl at all?

I intend to, for the Catalyst app I'm developing. I prefer FastCGI as a
concept but if you treat mod_perl as an intelligent Perl application
launcher and stick perlbal in front of it, you can probably handle peaks
and troughs in load better and more efficiently than Lighttpd + FCGI
will. This isn't a limitation of FCGI, more of the granularity of
control over spawning and reaping FCGI listener processes. I've been
looking with interest at FCGI::ProcManager and wondering about
shoehorning support for it onto Perlbal. I think fundamentally mod_perl
is going to be heavier-weight but it'll all be shared and copy-on-write,
whereas I suspect that while each FCGI process's perl binary is shared,
the libraries (modules) loaded will not be. If you need to run lots and
lots of listeners per box, that might be an issue. 

Once I have my benchmarks completed I'll write them up and post them
somewhere - maybe an article for perl.com if I have the tuits. I wonder
if it's too late to offer a talk to YAPC::EU on the subject...

/joel