Re: nginx and lua for web scripting

[Harley Laue <losinggeneration@...>]

On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 4:03 PM, Coda Highland <chighland@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 2:01 PM, Harley Laue <losinggeneration@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 3:48 PM, Coda Highland <chighland@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sep 24, 2012 1:17 PM, "Harley Laue" <losinggeneration@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 2:24 PM, Petite Abeille
>>>> <petite.abeille@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> >
>>>> > On Sep 23, 2012, at 2:43 AM, g.lister <g.lister@nodeunit.com> wrote:
>>>> >
>>>> >> I was wondering what are people doing for Lua web development and if
>>>> >> anyone is using nginx as the HTTP server and how is Lua setup in this case.
>>>> >
>>>> > While nginx is a fine piece of machinery, do you really need such a
>>>> > tight integration and its added complexity?
>>>> >
>>>> > CGI is looked down at, but its simplicity and portability cannot be
>>>> > beaten.
>>>>
>>>> IMO it's rightly looked down upon for well establish reasons (the
>>>> overhead of spawning a new process on each request causes scaling
>>>> issues.) That's why FCGI & SCGI came about to help with that
>>>> bottleneck.
>>>
>>> There's more to it than just the spawn overhead. There's also the state
>>> overhead. Each CGI process spawned has to re-query the relevant portions of
>>> state from long-term storage, including state that is temporary but
>>> longer-lived than a single request. A persistent process can maintain
>>> relevant state in RAM, avoiding the need to repeatedly query for
>>> rarely-changing data and offering a better way of dealing with session data.
>>>
>>> /s/ Adam
>>
>> Yes, I was merely giving a single example of where it can cause bottle
>> necks. There are obvious others, but I didn't think I needed to give a
>> complete list ;)
>>
>
> The re-query overhead is a bigger deal than the spawn overhead, in
> light of the other comments that have been made in the thread. ;) I
> mean, a really slim inetd-based server can do the job efficiently
> enough, so there's gotta be more than that to make it a big deal.
>
> /s/ Adam
>

True, and I concede it's likely a larger overhead than spawning. I
would however say the process being spawned can be a consideration.
Spawning a Lua script is going to have a much smaller overhead than a
Ruby script (and once you throw in large frameworks, this actually
becomes more noticeable.)