Richard and Stephen,

I'm still confused as to the difference between using revServer and using the 
3.5 engine. My mental model is that when the apache webserver sees a script 
with an irev extension it sends it over to the 3.5 engine to parse it. The 3.5 
engine sends back some html to push out the door to the browser in Glendale. 
Apache and the 3.5 engine work together to allow us to use irev scripts. Does 
the revServer work with Apache to do the same thing?

In short, why RevServer instead of the 3.5 engine?

Mike





--- On Fri, 8/13/10, Richard Gaskin <[email protected]> wrote:

From: Richard Gaskin <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Revserver / Dreamhost question
To: "How to use Revolution" <[email protected]>
Date: Friday, August 13, 2010, 11:10 AM

stephen barncard wrote:

> 1.  If I want to use my own Revserver instance at Dreamhost, would I have to
> get a 'Personal Server' account?  I understand my shared hosting can't be
> used for this. Has anyone here done this?

Shared hosting should be fine.   Just like the older Rev CGI engine, the only 
limits you'll run into with RevServer are those imposed by the hosting company 
for shared accounts, which should be fine for most uses.

Hosts will vary in how they limit resource consumption to prevent a single 
account from dominating a shared CPU.  For example, on-rev.com, TierraNet, and 
others limit processes to 30 seconds, while Dreamhost limits them to about 300 
aggregate minutes per day.

Which is "better" will depend on your needs (and if you ran a single process 
for 300 consecutive minutes you'd likely get a letter from Dreamhost asking why 
you need to do that <g>).  But no matter which specific limits are used by the 
host, most CGIs will run quite well within them.  Very few on-rev.com customers 
have run into these limits themselves, and I run a lot of CGIs on TierraNet, 
Dreamhost, and others and have never come even close them at all.

As many here have noted, 30 seconds is a very long time to run a continuous 
process.  With my CGIs I target a maximum of 5 seconds and may in some extreme 
cases tolerate up to 10 seconds if absolutely unavoidable, but even that's too 
long for my tastes; I can't have the user siting there without feedback for 
that long.

Looking at resource averages as our guide on this, the Dreamhost support wiki 
says: "Average shared hosting customers normally use less than 5 CPU minutes 
per day for their account".  When you consider the popularity of Wordpress, 
Drupal, Joomla, and other PHP/MySQL-driven systems, that average lends a good 
perspective of how even complex systems perform under normal loads.

Given the speed of the Rev engine, I'd be surprised if you ever needed more 
than a second or two to run most things you'd want to do with it on your 
server.  With the revJournal.com blog, the custom search engine I built for a 
client, and other relatively processor-intensive tasks, the Rev engine is able 
to do what I ask of it in a fraction of a second.

But if you ever find that you do need to run unusually lengthy processes, 
Andre's latest article in the RevUp newsletter covers how to break up a long 
task into chunks that allow even a shared-hosting account to run long processes 
without denying performance to other accounts, and will keep your users happy 
with good responsiveness:

<http://www.runrev.com/newsletter/august/issue98/newsletter2.php?id=NW098S29789>


> 2. If I want to use RevServer on multiple domains -  is a  single license
> good for this? Per server, not per domain, right?

My understanding is that it's per server rather than per domain. So if your 
Dreamhost account has a dozen domains you should be able to use RevServer on 
all of them, but if you also have hosting on another service you would need an 
additional license for that other server.

--
 Richard Gaskin
 Fourth World
 Rev training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
 Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com
 revJournal blog: http://revjournal.com/blog.irv
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