Brown trousers time :~

[Dirk Koopman]

Lyle - CosmicPerl.com wrote:
> Dirk Koopman wrote:
>> I much prefer any of the small threaded/select based webservers (eg 
>> lighttpd, litespeed, thttpd etc) with a FastCGI back end.
> Quick question, forgive me for not having looked into this yet but I've 
> got a lot to get through. Are any of these available on Win32 as well? 
> If so do they also run FastCGI and run well on Win32?
> 

The critical thing here is FastCGI and that certainly works on windows. 
Even if you use apache (and the latest version is pretty quick, just 
toooo big and complicated for my taste). Never forget that you can also 
use the Zen webserver, if you don't mind proprietary.

The important things about FastCGI, that aren't necessarily obvious, are 
(in no particular order) :-

* it is a CGI environment, which means you have a relatively simple 
means to write, test and debug stuff - stuff can be more IMHO easily 
tested and debugged standalone.

* that you can have several instances (maybe on several machines) as a 
FastCGI "farm" and a good implementation at the webserver end will 
automatically distribute the load across the whole farm.

* It is much easier to monitor and control cpu + ram usage than a 
mod_perl environment, because you are dealing with pure perl processes 
(not mixed up with apache code and its requirements).

* Because FastCGI scales up more or less automatically, it is 
comparatively easy to go from a one box -> many box solution. But that 
does not absolve you from thinking about and then testing for the 
bottlenecks that I guarantee you will find.

Dirk