[Catalyst] Development environments and performance

[Matt S Trout]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2008 at 11:51:53AM -0600, Wade.Stuart at fallon.com wrote:
> "John Goulah" <jgoulah at gmail.com> wrote on 01/16/2008 11:13:06 AM:
> 
> >
> >
> >
> > 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)
> 
> Could be a massive assumption,  but usually when you go through the cost
> (time, cap) of building out a dev server environment you want it to mirror
> your production servers as much as possible so that you spend time
> squishing bugs that may exist in your production environment -- not some
> other different environment.  If they are using FCGI in prod it makes
> perfect sense to do so in dev.  Why battle bugs that may be introduced on
> the standalone server, or worse miss bugs that _do_ affect your production
> environment because you are developing on a different environment?

No, it doesn't.

It's an idiotic mistake that will cost them in hardware, developer time and
velocity.

A development environment should be optimised for -development-. That means
using whatever gets your change cycle down as fast as possible, which is
usually the standalone server (possibly with the POE engine for multiprocess).

I've gone to the trouble of embedding several legacy Maypole apps into Catalyst
using Catalyst::Controller::WrapCGI purely for the purpose of being able to
use the cat standalone server for development; the turnaround speed compared
to a mod_perl inatance makes a massive difference to the efficiency of the
development process, and getting done faster means I've more time to go over
the changes carefully on staging and still get a timely production deployment.

-- 
      Matt S Trout       Need help with your Catalyst or DBIx::Class project?
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