Q: What's the difference between FastCGI and a reverse proxy?
A: There has been talk of exposing OpenACS functionality via FastCGI, as a way to avoid writing/maintaining separate web server API connections. I was thinking about how this differs from using a reverse proxy. Both approaches are used to expose e.g. Zope functionality via Apache.
FastCGI is good for pooling arbitrary applications behind a web server, especially when they grab expensive resources like database connections. It incorporates pool initialization/pre-spawning and load balancing. In the case of Zope, the web listener isn't the greatest, so there's some benefit to getting it out of the response loop. WRT AOLServer, the multithreaded, multiprocess nature of the server + it's connection pooling gives you many of the benefits of FastCGI just by proxying requests to it. The main benefit to getting a FastCGI version of AOLServer might be that you don't have to maintain the web listener part, and so keeping a Win32 port up to date would theoretically be easier. As an added benefit, you no longer need mod_aolserver and ns_isapi.
3:53:50 PM 
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