[Mono-dev] FastCGI, was: Silverlight early implementation thoughts.

[Robert Jordan]

Hey,

Marek Habersack wrote:
> On Mon, 07 May 2007 11:27:15 -0400, Miguel de Icaza <miguel at novell.com>
> scribbled:
> 
>> Hello,
> Hey,
> 
>>> It's basically a "persistent CGI" application which communicates with the
>>> server over a unix|tcp socket using a well-defined protocol. Basically, what
>>> mod_mono does but not mono-specific and not tied to apache. It's what
>>> mod_mono should've been from the start. We're going to keep maintaining
>>> mod_mono, but I expect most development effort in this area will go into
>>> the FastCGI server (no matter what is the outcome of the SoC project)
>> One requirement that I have is that the FastCGI bridge supports
>> auto-configuration, or some other easy form of configuration.
> Yep, that will be part of the implementation, although I believe it is more a
> feature of xsp itself than a bridge.

I doubt FastCGI would be easier to configure.

Let's have a look at a typical FastCGI configuration:

FastCgiServer /usr/lib/mono/www/mono-fastcgi-server
<Directory /usr/lib/mono/www/>
	SetHandler fastcgi-script
</Directory>
Alias /aspnet-app-name /usr/lib/mono/www/mono-fastcgi-server

If the whole URL namespace should be consumed by mono
(e.g. to enable ASP.NET application auto-confguration),
the apache config gets even worse:

FastCgiServer /usr/lib/mono/www/mono-fastcgi-server
<Directory /usr/lib/mono/www/>
	SetHandler fastcgi-script
</Directory>
Alias /mono-global-handler /usr/lib/mono/www/mono-fastcgi-server
Action mono-handler /mono-global-handler
SetHandler mono-handler

Configuring an application-to-mono-process mapping, easily
to achieve with mod_mono, will become a nightmare with FastCGI.
Moreover, the config snippets above must be inserted in
every vhost, otherwise the vhosts will share the same
mono-fastcgi-server process.

And since HttpResponse.TransmitFile won't be as efficient as it
used to be under mod_mono (which simply passes the file name
to apache), even more apache config voodoo is required (and that's
the best case).

Robert