[Catalyst] Switching to a production server

[Emily Heureux]

Thanks, I read your suggestions and opinions and am switching to fastcgi
with apache.  I'd like to do this in steps:
1. Install FCGI::ProcManager
2. Run myapp_fastcgi.pl from the command line, just like myapp_server.pl
3. Then go through apache with mod_fastcgi.

I am on step 2, and I am thinking that I can't do that with that fastcgi
script like I can with myapp_server.pl.  I need to combine 2 and 3?

E

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ivorw [mailto:m9tn-oh4c at xemaps.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 10, 2008 1:34 AM
> To: catalyst at lists.scsys.co.uk
> Subject: Re: [Catalyst] Switching to a production server
> 
> 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.
> 
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