Re: FastCGI daemon

[Jacob Jay <jacob@...>]

On 23 Oct 2009, at 10:58 AM, Stefan wrote:

> Hello all, I was recently looking at different ways to switch our  
> web application written in Lua from apache to nginx (we are  
> currently using mod_wombat *in production* to earn a living).
>
> One night, I started with the FastCGI devkit threaded.c example, and  
> after a bit'o'hackin started to see some promising results. It is  
> multi-threaded and very lightweight, with Lua VM states that persist  
> between HTTP requests.
>
> So I tossed it up on http://github.com/STPeters/luafcgid and now I  
> have come to the point where I will be building the interface (API?)  
> from Lua land back to the worker thread. I was going to just build a  
> mod_wombat compatible one, but then thought I would ask here - just  
> in case anyone else was interested in one day using this abomination.
>
> WSAPI comes to mind as a potential target...

[cc'd to Kepler list]

FastCGI is definitely the way to go, but if you haven't, do check out  
wsapi-fcgi which is part of Kepler (http://keplerproject.org/). I use  
this with spawn-fcgi and lighttpd/nginx. An additional FCGI-Lua  
interface may be unnecessary unless you want it to do something  
notably different to that of the Kepler WSAPI one.

I had actually been considering replacing wsapi-fcgi with something  
like your setup if only for simplicity...however now that I've  
measured yours against it, the extra functionality of wsapi-fcgi is  
probably worth its little additional overhead.

For a basic "hello world" test wsapi-fcgi yields results similar to  
yours (both in the region of 4,000+ requests per second on 2 cores)  
and the best I've seen thus far is 7000rps on 4 cores (makes all the  
difference, given that I can't seem to otherwise push CPU use to the  
max.).

Incidentally luafcgid is eating CPU at ~6% when idle (on OS X, anyway).