[Zope] Running ZopeHTTPServer and PCGI together = a bad thing?

[Jim Fulton]

Michel Pelletier wrote:
> 
(snip)

> A wafer-thin CGI program is forked for every request, this is used to
> connect up Apache and the Zope long running process.  So yes, this
> expensive fork happens for every request. 

It's not *that* expensive.  This is a very thin wrapper.

> It's no different, however, then other CGI overhead. 

It's reallu much lower than typical CGI overhead.  Most CGI
scripts are written using interpreters (e.g. sh, perl, Python).
Cranking up an interpreter is much more expensive than cranking up
the pcgi_wrapper.

> One of these days, someone is going to write a
> mod_pcgi module for Apache, and take that expensive fork out.  For light
> loads, it's really not noticeable, but for heavy loads, one fork per
> request gets heavy. 

I think a site could sustain a million hits a day using pcgi on moderately
fast hardware.

> ZServer is noticably faster in this regard than
> Apache.

True.  An an apache module would definately be a good thing.

BTW, ZServer supports PCGI, so you *can* use Apache+PCGI+ZServer.
This is useful, for example, if you want to use Apache to do SSL
while using ZServer for other HTTP requests and FTP.

Jim

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