On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 1:55 PM, Tomas Doran <[email protected]> wrote:
You're worrying about the efficiency of pushing bytes around, but you're > using shared hosting. > > Surely this is premature optimisation? > t0m, The applications I'm writing are expected to have a relatively small number of users. From my experience so far the performance is quite good on a shared hosting as long as I serve the static content from outside Catalyst. Otherwise performance degrades significantly since each user has to deal with a few static files that weight a few MB each. This approach works for me as long as the static content requires no authentication or the whole site requires authentication. It just have to edit a single .htaccess file. My concern is to keep the setup as simple as possible, and I find this configuration very advantageous compared to dedicated/virtual hosting since I don't have to take care of the servers (we are a small team with more programming than systems administration experience) Now I'm facing a new situation which is that some parts of the Catalyst application have to be public. Since it's not a very different situation than what I had been doing so far I think is legitimate to expect to be able to solve it with similar tools. I'm very grateful to you and kmx and Charlie for your help. Thanks to you (and a bit of research and experimentation on my own) I've learned that for achieving this goal I will have to sacrifice some flexibility: I should design my applications in a way that there is only two paths that lead to secure content (one that goes through catalyst and one that is static). In this way I can solve the problem with a simple directory structure and two .htaccess files. The layout of the public files/actions is not restricted. I can't have paths to actions that behave differently depending on whether or not the user has logged in. For completeness sake I'll also say that there is a trivial solution that avoids this trade off in flexibility: to set up a "guest" account. But I don't like this solution because it would annoy guest users. Through this discussion I've learned valuable knowledge which will help me make design and planning decisions. Thanks again to all for your replies, Francesc
_______________________________________________ List: [email protected] Listinfo: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
