[Catalyst] FastCGI deployment - slow to complete request

[Steve Rippl]

Hi,

I have a small Catalyst app, the production version of which has been 
running pretty well using the built in server as there haven't been too 
many user at once.  I'm trying to anticipate higher concurrent usage and 
switch to FastCGI (as that seems to be recommended in the book) and I 
have the following running in Apache

FastCgiServer /srv/WsdSis/script/wsdsis_fastcgi.pl -processes 5
Alias / /srv/WsdSis/script/wsdsis_fastcgi.pl/

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName sis.woodlandschools.org
  ServerAdmin webmaster at woodlandschool.org
  DocumentRoot  /srv/WsdSis/root
  Alias /static /srv/WsdSis/root/static
</VirtualHost>

Now this works, it's serving up the application, but each request is 
really slow to complete!  The obvious effect of this is that a page with 
JavaScript waiting for a complete page before it does it's thing looks 
dreadful for a while, the html has arrived but the browser is still 
spinning, then eventually the page completes and the JS runs.  (I know 
about graceful failure for JS, but I have an app that is going to depend 
on it!).  If I switch this back to the built in server then the page is 
completed faster than I can notice and the page renders correctly 
immediately.  Back on FastCGI and even a simple page request is taking 
~10 seconds to complete (again, that html arrives straight away, but 
then the browser keeps spinning as if it's still waiting on something). 

This is running on a Debian 5 machine using libapache2-mod-fastcgi. 

Thanks,
Steve

-- 
Steve Rippl
Technology Director
Woodland Public Schools
360 225 9451 x326