> On Tue, Mar 19, 2002 at 06:56:08PM -0800, Quinn Dunkan wrote:
> > I gather the reason for SCGI is that FastCGI is too complicated.
>
> We found FastCGI a little unreliable.  Every couple of days or weeks our
> site would stop serving dynamic pages.  We tracked the problem down to
> the FastCGI process manager.  That's were to complicated part sucked.
> We never did figure it out.

Yeah, I get lots of weird FastCGI stuff too.  Sometimes the script hangs
(I always get the fcgi timeout), then I have to kill it manually, and when
the next one comes on line it gets hit with all the stacked up requests and
won't respond for a while.  That's probably a problem with my design---I can
only run one process since I cache user data in memory (otherwise, reloading
the world on every request would kill any advantage persistent cgi gives) so
one slow network connection will hang all pending requests.  I guess the way
around that would be session affinity, where you have multiple scripts but the
same session always goes to the same script.  Or keep everything in one process
but have the CGI dispatcher thing start a new thread for every request.

Another annoying FCGI thing is the automatic script restarts, which means that
a compile/import time error in the python will cause FCGI to keep restarting
the process over and over again until you fix it.  I should probably make
FCGI's restart-delay a little longer.

> > The thing I always liked about PCGI was that you didn't have to
> > compile and insert modules into apache (and it wasn't
> > apache-specific).  Is it too slow?
>
> I haven't gotten around to writing an CGI to SCGI adaptor yet.  It
> should be trivial.  Using mod_scgi should give better performance; much
> better if the adaptor is written in Python.
>
> > Anyway, I'm sure that a PCGI <-> Quixote link would be easy.  Maybe
> > I'll try it out some day if I ever want to distribute anything.
>
> Probably easy.  I don't know what advantage it would give though.

Well, if SCGI works as a plain CGI script (connecting to a long-running python)
then PCGI would have little advantage.  Last time I messed with Zope (quite a
long time ago) they were talking about mod_pcgi, so maybe that's been done by
now.

PCGI has been around for a while, and I assume it's been banged on more than
SCGI, so there could be a stability win.  And just thinking of the whole
"no sense reinventing existing code" thing.