LC server experience return anyone ?

[Richard Gaskin]

jbv wrote:

 > A few years ago, when I had the metacard engine installed on a
 > dedicated server, the way it worked was that a new instance of
 > the engine would launch for every incoming request, and would
 > quit once the task was completed. This was ok for the kind of
 > site I was working on : low-trafic site with complex tasks for
 > each request.
 > Is is the same with LC server ?

Yes, and it's the same for most CGI applications, such as PHP, Perl, 
etc.  In essence these are just command line apps called from Apache.

It's possible to set up PHP and Perl as stay-resident processes using 
mod_php/mod_perl, but on Dreamhost and others they don't do that because 
of server load - see the note here:
<http://blog.dreamhosters.com/2006/04/11/end-of-php-as-an-apache-module/>


 > And is there a risk for the server to choke if too many instances
 > launch simultaneously, or is there a way to tell Apache to queue
 > the requests somehow ?

This is a question I've been pondering myself, esp. when comparing LC 
Server-based systems to complex beasts like Drupal.

When PHP us running as a CGI, all the core components of Drupal are 
loaded and initialized with each run - this is usually more overhead 
than most of us have with our LC Server apps (for example, the Drupal 
docs note a minimum RAM requirement of 18 MBs, while a single instance 
of LC server generally takes less than 2MB).

When a CGI app is done its memory is freed up, so the hit only comes for 
the duration in which simultaneous requests are being processed.

So it would seem likely that you'll have multiple instances of LC Server 
running simultaneously during peak hours.

But on the flipside, Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla and other complex systems 
are based on PHP, which is often run as a CGI, so even with multiple 
instances it would seem the impact is minimal.

Anyone have any good metrics on CGI RAM usage at scale?

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
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