<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 1:55 PM, Tomas Doran <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:bobtfish@bobtfish.net" target="_blank">bobtfish@bobtfish.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
You're worrying about the efficiency of pushing bytes around, but you're using shared hosting.<br>
<br>
Surely this is premature optimisation?<div><div></div><div></div></div></blockquote><div><br><br>t0m,<br><br>The applications I'm writing are expected to have a relatively small number of users. From my experience so far the performance is quite good on a shared hosting as long as I serve the static content from outside Catalyst. Otherwise performance degrades significantly since each user has to deal with a few static files that weight a few MB each.<br>
<br>This approach works for me as long as the static content requires no authentication or the whole site requires authentication. It just have to edit a single .htaccess file. <br><br>My concern is to keep the setup as simple as possible, and I find this configuration very advantageous compared to dedicated/virtual hosting since I don't have to take care of the servers (we are a small team with more programming than systems administration experience)<br>
<br>Now I'm facing a new situation which is that some parts of the Catalyst application have to be public. Since it's not a very different situation than what I had been doing so far I think is legitimate to expect to be able to solve it with similar tools.<br>
<br>I'm very grateful to you and kmx and Charlie for your help. Thanks to you (and a bit of research and experimentation on my own) I've learned that for achieving this goal I will have to sacrifice some flexibility: I should design my applications in a way that there is only two paths that lead to secure content (one that goes through catalyst and one that is static). In this way I can solve the problem with a simple directory structure and two .htaccess files. The layout of the public files/actions is not restricted. I can't have paths to actions that behave differently depending on whether or not the user has logged in.<br>
<br>For completeness sake I'll also say that there is a trivial solution that avoids this trade off in flexibility: to set up a "guest" account. But I don't like this solution because it would annoy guest users.<br>
<br>Through this discussion I've learned valuable knowledge which will help me make design and planning decisions.<br>
<br>Thanks again to all for your replies,<br>Francesc<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br></div></div><br>