On 10/31/06, Sam Livingston-Gray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
My (admittedly quite limited) understanding is that Apache doesn't serve Rails apps itself, but it can act as a reverse proxy (see also: pound), dispatching requests to, e.g., dispatch.fcgi or mongrel. I believe Dreamhost does this with Apache fronting for FCGI.
A reverse proxy and FastCGI are two different things. Not to make this whole discussion too confusing, but it *is* good to understand the difference. In the case of a reverse proxy, the web (HTTP) server is just passing on the HTTP requests to another HTTP server. With FastCGI, it is using a different protocol to convey those requests (along with additional information) to another process (which likely doesn't handle HTTP directly at all). The reason Textdrive, Dreamhost and many other hosting companies use Apache up front and then allow you to run lighttpd, mongrel or some other webserver is so that they can (in theory, and to a limited degree) control the overall security and configuration that's exposed externally, while still giving you the ability to start and stop your server as needed. That is, you aren't allowed to touch the master config or stop & start the front end apache instance, but you can modify you own server as needed and they will just pass the requests on to your server. Also, I would imagine that in most cases they have limited incoming connections so that they can't directly connect to your personal lighttpd/mongrel/whatever instance (though this is just a hypothesis on my part at this point). It's confusing, but makes sense in a manner of speaking. _______________________________________________ PDXRuby mailing list [email protected] IRC: #pdx.rb on irc.freenode.net http://lists.pdxruby.org/mailman/listinfo/pdxruby
