Article on Rails with MPM worker

I’m in the process of writing a small document on using Typo with MPM worker and FastCGI. The Rails community is fixated on lighttpd for “performance” reasons. Apache httpd 2 is pretty easy to configure to get significant additional speed, but few people seem to bother.

No need for a proxy, or yet another web server soaking up all the memory on your system, you can do it all with 5 or 10 total processes. (Besides, soaking up memory is what amavisd is for.) And if you’re doing interactive things like serving web pages, you certainly do not want to be anywhere near swap anyway unless you hate the people viewing your page and want them to hate you. That people have swap 2-3x RAM size on systems with 2GB of RAM is insane. Almost as insane as letting an interactive operating system continue to create more and more page files over time as it vastly oversubscribes available memory, that would be absolutely crazy, as well as stupid and worth it’s own rant on another occasion.

In any case, I’ll have the MPM worker detail posted in the next few days. This configuration has saved me at least 100MB of allocated memory space, mostly due to 100% less mod_php. Turns out PHP as a FastCGI is smaller anyway, a nice bonus.