On Fri, Jul 26, 2002 at 10:49:16AM -0400, Greg Ward wrote:
>FastCGI seems to work pretty well for simple stuff, but it kept flaking
>out for us on our main web site.  It could be just that Apache's
>mod_fastcgi is flaky; we never looked into it deeply.

I think we pretty clearly demonstrated that it *was* some kind of
locking problem in mod_fastcgi.  The FastCGI module starts a bunch of
FastCGI worker processes, and one more process that manages the
others.  Whenever all the FastCGI processes would stop responding,
killing the manager process would unfreeze them and set things working
again for a little while, until the worker processes had all exited;
there was then no longer a manager process to start new workers, so
you'd be stuck again.

>I think Neil was
>just repulsed by the complexity of FastCGI, so he wrote SCGI instead.

And that's the second reason.  mod_fastcgi has lots of code for
restarting processes, and I eyeballed it looking for an obvious bug,
but found nothing; I assume Neil did the same.  The bug was rare
enough that it only struck about once a week, often enough to be
annoying but not frequent enough to be easy to reproduce and debug.

--amk