On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 3:03 PM, Dean Landolt <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 12:35 PM, Matt <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 12:01 PM, Chris Scribner <[email protected]>wrote:
>>
>>> On the topic of "why use node to service static files"...
>>>
>>> Because if you don't need to understand, configure, and maintain an
>>> extra piece of software in your stack, things get simpler.
>>>
>>
>> On a very basic level yes, but there are more advantages to using a
>> front-end nginx server than there are this one downside of "it's another
>> piece of software".
>>
>
> That's a value judgement that you can't possibly make for other people.
> Nor are you in any position to understand what is *good enough* for other
> people's use cases.
>

I'm trying to stick to facts. But sure, if you weighed the pros of running
a proxy front end extremely low against the  con of having 1 more piece of
software running, then you may come out with having a proxy as a negative.
But I would hope people are aware of all the benefits before making that
choice. Having one more piece of software in place is a con you have to
deal with once. The rest of the benefits you gain occur all the time:

- Ability to proxy to multiple different backends as your site expands
(e.g. maybe even mixing technologies, such as Rack/Sinatra and Node).
- A well tested, battle hardened static file server with support for all of
HTTP already coded in (e.g. will your Node file server do
If-Modified-Since? ETags? Gzip compress on the fly? Support sendfile()? Log
correctly when scaled to multiple CPUs? Support Accept headers?)
- When you restart or take down your Node process for maintenance of some
sort, do your users see a spinny beachball or a nice "Site is down for
Maintenance" page which nginx can easily deliver?

There's probably a couple more I forgot, but those are the biggies.


> If node can get 10-50% faster at serving static files, then that's X
>>> number of more deployments that don't need to complicate their
>>> infrastructure more than it needs to be.
>>>
>>
>> I can almost guarantee you there are no deployments where this is a
>> limiting factor.
>>
>
> What? Serving static files? Exactly.
>

Right. I've never once said Node is too slow at serving static files.
Perhaps you misread my posts?

Matt.

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