Perrin Harkins <perrin <at> elem.com> writes: > > On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 12:49 PM, David E. Wheeler <david <at> kineticode.com> wrote: > > To a certain degree, Apache/mod_perl is a victim of the success of HTTP. > > It's fairly easy to implement a new HTTP server, so there are a lot of them, > > and many are easy to use and extremely fast. If all you're interested in is > > serving a Rails or Catalyst app, Apache/mod_perl starts to seem like much > > too big a beast. > > I've said this before, but I think this is not a very rational claim. > Network servers are actually pretty hard to get right and HTTP is no > longer very simple. More to the point, there's nothing "heavy" about > apache/mod_perl compared to other web servers + FastCGI. An > event-based server like Lighttpd will have better performance than > Apache 2's worker MPM (the recommended choice for front-end proxies) > on static files, but who has a bottleneck on static files these days? >
But you _do_ want to keep static file serving apart from the app code (or else incur the memory overhead of an app process for every file download), so you do need to go that frontend/backend route -- and it seems to me that apache behind a proxy (which may be another apache) is a lot bigger and uglier a beast than fastcgi behind a webserver (which may be apache).
