[FASTCGI] FastCGI Expert Sought

[Matthew Weigel]

Ross Richey wrote:

> So yes this might be something which needs to be handled at the Lighttpd
> level.  But before we do that I just want to ask the conceptual question:
> 
> Is there some method of nicely killing and respawning a FastCGI process?

I run lighttpd on my personal server and do my personal web development
as FastCGI; however, I don't rely on lighttpd's process management
functionality to do it[1].

If you do use lighttpd's own process management (e.g., specifying in
lighttpd.conf the 'bin-path' for a FastCGI process)... first of all,
have you looked at
http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/lighttpd/wiki/Docs:ModFastCGI ?
You should be able to set a minimum number of processes, and a maximum
number of processes, for that FastCGI server.  I *think* - but again, I
don't use this part of lighttpd myself - that if you simply configure
your Perl program to exit after handling X number of requests, lighttpd
will spawn new processes once the number of remaining processes drops
below the minimum.

PHP has the functionality you're asking about (each child process dies
after X requests) built in, without needing to be spawned/managed by
lighttpd, and I wrote a small Perl application that does it as well.
The traffic I get for this particular web app is minimal, so I've never
needed to take the PHP approach of having a master process that manages
multiple children who occasionally restart; it's definitely possible though.

> The reason I asked for an expert and offered money is that we're fully
> expecting that we might have to get someone to actually add that
> functionality to FastCGI, but obviously I'm open to other ideas on
> fixing the problem.

Attached is the skeleton of the Perl application I wrote, minus the
actual HTML generation, form handling, etc.  It might help with writing
a Perl FastCGI server that isn't managed directly by lighttpd.  You
might have an easier time simply changing your existing code to exit
after X requests, but both options are worth considering.  It works for
me, but that's no guarantee. :-)

1. I do quite a bit to separate privileges and functionality; I have
lighttpd configured to chroot itself to /var/www and drop root
privileges when it starts, and for example PHP is spawned via lighttpd's
spawn-fcgi in a more restrictive chroot (like
/var/www/first.example.net/) as a more restricted user.
-- 
 Matthew Weigel
 hacker
 unique & idempot . ent
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