[Catalyst] Switching to a production server

[ivorw]

Emily Heureux wrote:
>
> Hi, I have been developing a Catalyst application and just using the
> Catalyst myapp_server.pl script to run it.  We server a very small
> market, currently less than 100 visits a day.  The major issue we are
> having is that even small images are loaded very slowly, and therefore
> the pages are loaded slowly, on the order of more than 5 seconds for a
> first time visitor.
>
>  
>
> At this time, I don’t know anything about fast_cgi or configuring
> apache or what have you, to work with Catalyst, but before I take that
> on, my question is, is it likely that the slow loading of very small
> images has to do with the default myapp_server.pl, and switching to
> something else will make a big difference with loading images and
> possibly other files?
>
>  
>
I don't recommend going live by running myapp_server.pl - this is
intended for development and debugging. I do recommend using a
standalone fastcgi process farm (which could have just a single
instance), talking through a named pipe in the /tmp directory. The
fastcgi process runs in your application user account, saving you from
having to open up the permissions of your files to the www-data user.

This is quite well documented, see
http://search.cpan.org/~mramberg/Catalyst-Runtime/lib/Catalyst/Engine/FastCGI.pm

Also apart from in special circumstances, there's usually no reason to
serve images through your Catalyst application. The special
circumstances I imagine could be if the image is being stored in a
database blob, or being tweaked on the fly with ImageMagick.

One option could be to change the URLs for the images to be absolute
ones on the webserver, rather than static/images/powered_by.jpg etc.
which will deliver performance results with myapp_server.pl. You'd need
to copy the root/static/images directory to somewhere more public, where
the www-data user can see and use it. A recommended, documented option
is to configure Apache to handle /static rather than pass these requests
to the application with the following config snippet:

<Location /static>
            SetHandler          default-handler
</Location>


For more on configuring Apache 2.0, see
http://search.cpan.org/~agrundma/Catalyst-Engine-Apache/lib/Catalyst/Engine/Apache2/MP20.pm

Please bear it in mind that most of the information in this Pod is about
configuring  your Catalyst app to run under mod_perl. I much prefer
fastcgi as it gives me much more control and awareness of machine
resources, keeps my permissions sane, and allows me to run multiple
different Catalyst applications and versions on the same box.


Ivor.