[Zope] How Fast & Stable??

[Paul Everitt]

chas wrote:
> 
> >One programming note: within the next month we'll check in the work for
> >FastCGI, meaning you can sit behind Apache and not pay the fork tax.
> 
> Please excuse my ignorance here, and not wishing to take too much
> of your precious time Paul, but why use FastCGI ? wasn't PCGI
> supposed to be even better or have I been brainwashed by spending
> too long on Mr Bauer's homepage ?

Phillip provided almost all of the answer, so I'll just add a couple of
other points:

1) FastCGI lets you connect across a network using TCP, not just on the
local machine.  Jeff has been working on this for PCGI.

2) FastCGI lets you specify a pool of servers to connect to.  If one
process isn't available, I believe you'll be connected to the next one.

3) The company selling the commercial version of FastCGI is putting some
load balancing algorithms in.

For us, FastCGI is attractive for one very simple reason: a large group
of people outside Digtial Creations is doing the work.  It is very
important to have a non-forking request model on Apache/Netscape/IIS,
and we just aren't in the position to keep the expertise for all of
those server APIs.

This does *not* mean that we are dropping PCGI support in Zope.  Right
now, it just means we are *adding* FastCGI support.

--Paul