On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 10:07:00PM -0400, Vincent Veselosky wrote:
>
> On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 7:48 PM, J?r?me Et?v?
> <[1]jerome.et...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Vincent,
> Why can it be wrong to serve binary content ? How do you do for
> instance when you want to dynamically generate an image or any kind
> of
> binary document based on the user's data ?
> Cheers !
> J
>
> I wouldn't say it is "wrong" necessarily, only that it is often not
> the best solution. Some disadvantages:
> * performance: Apache will serve binary content from the file system
> with better response times
> * memory: serving with a mod_perl process could use 10-100MB more RAM
> than Apache optimized for static files (and since binaries are often
> larger than text files, the process will be held longer)
> * pain: one slip in the code can cause your binary to be corrupted,
> and this can be hard to debug.
> I find it is often more efficient to pre-generate binaries using an
> offline script. That said, I have used Mason to serve binaries,
> specifically CAPTCHA images which need to be both randomly generated
> and associated with a particular form submission for checking. It's
> not always wrong! :)
> Some rules to follow in components that serve binary data:
> * Always use the inherit => undef flag. Any text sent from any
> component in the chain will corrupt your binary, and this is the only
> way to ensure that never happens.
> * Always explicitly set the content-type header in the component
> (before you flush any buffers!).
> * Name the component with an extension appropriate to the
> content-type. If it generates pdf files, name it something.pdf, and
> modify your apache configuration specially for that file. (This one
> may be considered controversial, but I find it saves lots of pain at
> the client side, and I strongly recommend it.)
> Does anyone else have some handy tips? I would like to hear how others
> are doing this too.
> --
> -Vince Veselosky
I know it's inefficient, and once I saw where Dave Rolsky mentioned that
he used a separate handler to serve images, but for me Mason was very handy
for serving scaled images. A dhandler in the thumb directory could
serve images /docroot/thumb/pic.jpeg?scale=100&quality=75 scaled from
images stored in an images directory and m->cache made saving the scaled
images soo easy. I need to replace it for other reasons, but it sure was a
nice way to get started.
Mark
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