[CentOS] Apache, fastcgi, ruby-on-rails etc.

Sun Mar 12 18:00:20 UTC 2006
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Sun, 2006-03-12 at 10:33, Michael Metz wrote:

> I've read a bit about fastcgi, and wondered if it might be an 
> interesting solution for e.g. running php in a user-switched environment 
> or running ruby-on-rails etc.
> 
> But I wonder why nobody (searched on Google) seems to use CentOS with 
> mod_fastcgi for Apache 2.x.

Fastcgi hasn't been updated for a while.  It does work with
Centos.  You can find directions for installing Request Tracker
under RHEL with fastcgi here:
http://wiki.bestpractical.com/index.cgi?RHEL4InstallGuide
and it works equally well with Centos.

> And I also wonder why people actually using Apache 2.x and ruby-on-rails 
> with CentOS did run a lighthttpd-fastcgi inbetween and reverse-proxying 
> requests from Apache to lighthttpd to actually forward them to RoR 
> running as fastcgi.
> 
> Could sombody please give me a hint?

I don't know anything about this particular project but there
are several reasons to use a reverse-proxy front end.  One is
to hide the fact that you need different program instances
perhaps running under different uids or with conflicting
options to serve different parts of a site.  Another would
be to allow caching of parts of the output generated by
the real server.  Also, if you have clients connecting over
a slow link, using a lightweight proxy can release the
memory-intense server connection quickly while dribbling
the results back to the client.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com