Hi John On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 6:35 PM, John Hancock <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, I'm a newbie to Ruby. I'm installing an small server (256MB RAM) > with NginX, Neko, Perl, PHP4, PHP5, Ruby & MySQL. It's easy Perl, Neko & > PHP with FastCGI but why to use a mongrel cluster?
The only conceptual difference is the protocol being used between the reverse-proxy (nginx in this case) and the application servers. FastCGI is a protocol for reverse-proxies to speak to application servers. FastCGI is strange because it carries HTTP but is not HTTP. With a Mongrel-style setup your application servers speak to the reverse-proxy via HTTP. FastCGI has a slight advantage over HTTP in that it's easier to parser and more space-efficient on the line. However it adds an extra layer of complexity - an extra protocol. You can't, for example, use CURL to access a FastCGI application server. The structure is the same though - a load balancer reverse proxy process (nginx) and many application server processes (mongrel or FastCGI instances). The load balancer distributes requests to the app servers - gets a responses and sends them back to the clients. Mongrel has worked better for many of us - not because of the protocol difference - because it handles requests better. Ruby-FastCGI is also a web server and has request handling logic - it just speaks FastCGI instead of HTTP. Someone could develop a better Ruby-FastCGI binding which understood FastCGI but handled connections from the reverse-proxy better - but that hasn't been done yet. And IMO it is a bit pointless - there need not be a special protocol just for communication between load balancers and app servers. ry _______________________________________________ Mongrel-users mailing list Mongrel-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/mongrel-users
