[BNM] Apache / Apache 2 / FastCGI / Lighttpd advice

[Dominic Mitchell]

On Mon, Dec 04, 2006 at 01:59:14PM +0000, Dominic Mitchell wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 04, 2006 at 01:05:01PM +0000, Jay Caines-Gooby wrote:
> > Anyone been through similar growing pains and want to share the love?
> > 
> > The common thread between the two posts linked above is that both
> > mention Apache and mod_proxy as a front end. Any Zope people care to
> > comment?
> 
> I don't have experience with any of this at any professional level, just
> the rails app I use for my blog (typo).  I run Apache 2.2.3 and rails
> 1.1.6, along with some PHP (mostly just for squirrelmail).  I was
> getting very fed up with FastCGI as I would get random failures between
> Apache and the backend rails processes a lot.  I wasn't able to
> successfully diagnose these, in large part thanks to the utterly opaque
> nature of FastCGI.
> 
> So I switched to mongrel and haven't looked back.  I run mongrel on a
> high port and use mod_proxy to forward traffic to it.  I've had no
> troubles with it at all.

I should also point out that I'm just using plain mod_php embedded in
Apache for the PHP side of things.  It seems to work quite well,
although I doubt squirrelmail stresses things much.

Just a word of warning about PHP.  Many people have said that it's
unstable under Apache2.  It's not.  It's the dependent libraries that
are unstable.  Well, "not threadsafe" rather than "unstable".  And then
only if you're running a threaded MPM.  Stick to the prefork MPM and
everything will work great.

-Dom