[Catalyst] FastCGI on Shared Hosting

[Tomas Doran]

On 15 Jul 2010, at 15:02, André Walker wrote:
> I'm developing my first "real world" Catalyst application, and all  
> I have available to publish it is my shared hosting on Hostmonster.  
> It is working, but it's dynamic fastcgi, which means that after  
> about a minute of inactivity the process is killed, and then, to  
> access it again, it takes *6 seconds* to load the page. This is  
> incredibly annoying. And it's gonna be a very low traffic page, so  
> everybody who access it will probably have to wait those 6 seconds.


> Is there a way I can get static fastcgi to work there? I have ssh  
> access. Or maybe trap the signal the server sends to kill my process?
> To speed up the startup would be awesome, is there a way to do it?  
> Something like Module::Compile?


No, there isn't really.

Does your shared host web server do any caching? I.e. if you serve  
appropriate cache headers, then you could avoid this for most of your  
hits.

Otherwise, it's probably entirely possible to make a kludge for the  
front page with mod_rewrite - if you app is hit then it can write out  
the HTML to disk, and you can have a mod_rewrite rule to serve the  
static (cached) page if it's new enough.. Or do something more basic  
like /index.html being static, and including an <img> that you know  
is served from the app to wake the app up before the user clicks  
anything..

But the latter solutions are a lot of messing and application level  
work to do for little gain really.

You could also 'cheat', by getting a free pingdom account (which will  
monitor your apps uptime, and wake it up for this monitoring every 60  
seconds).. Depending how aggressively your ISP is killing fcgi  
processes this could be enough to keep it hot all the time..

Other than that, I'd suggest that slicehosts or some other small VM  
provider are very cheap these days ;)

Cheers
t0m