[Catalyst] Development environments and performance

[Dave Rolsky]

On Wed, 16 Jan 2008, Ian Docherty wrote:

>> Why wouldn't you just use the standalone server bundled with Catalyst? 
>> Fcgi is great for production, but the processes are fairly thick memory 
>> wise, so having instances for each developer could be an issue.   We use 
>> the cat server for development and works fine for about 5-10 people at any 
>> given time on a modest box (4G ram)
>>
> Good point and my reasons are not clear now :) mainly because when I 
> originally tried this I had conflicts between the URI served by apache and 
> the one served by catalyst. Having tried this tonight I see where I was going 
> wrong and I can easily set this up. So, I will try it this way for a few days 
> to see how it goes. Thanks.

It is worthwhile to make it easy for individual devs to run their code 
with fastcgi or whatever your end deployment environment will be. The 
built-in Catalyst dev server is fantastic for rapid development, but it's 
not identical to fastcgi or mod_perl (or whatever).

One example is configuring a front-end proxy for static content. You just 
cannot test changes to this proxy without using it, and the same goes for 
changes to a mod_perl configuration.

> The other reason was that I eventually was hoping to serve several clients 
> from the same machine, running multiple copies of the same application (but 
> perhaps different versions) and knew I could not do this with Apache mod-perl 
> but could do so with fast-cgi, hence my reason for going down that path.

A perfectly reasonable production plan.

> I suppose however that from this experience it would not be a good idea to 
> try and serve several fast-cgi Catalyst applications from the same server?

Not at all. This depends on the resources of the server, the resources the 
app needs, and how many clients each app servers. Of course, you also need 
to pay extra attention to shared environment things like libraries.


-dave

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