[Catalyst] FastCGI deployment - slow to complete request

[Andrew Rodland]

On Sunday 14 February 2010 10:59:54 pm Steve Rippl wrote:
> 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).

It's a bug in mod_fastcgi that mangles the Content-Length header when it's 
used together with output filters (almost always mod_deflate), and there are a 
couple of ways to deal with it.

Workaround: Disable mod_deflate, or at least prevent it from activating on 
anything that might come from mod_fastcgi.

Fix: Use a current snapshot version of mod_fastcgi. Source tarballs can be 
found in http://www.fastcgi.com/dist/ or if you'd like a deb, I've built 
http://cleverdomain.org/libapache2-mod-fastcgi_2.4.6.99~snap20081109_i386.deb 
(for Debian 5.0 i386).

Andrew