[Mono-dev] Architectural decisions behind mod_mono

[Jerome Haltom]

Hiawatha wrote:
> Hi all - I'm investigating the possibility of porting a site from
> .NET/Windows Server to Apache/Mono and am doing some homework about running
> Mono applications on the web.  As it stands, it seems the two choices are
> XSP, which is designed to be a test/debug server and not for highly scalable
> production applications, or mod_mono which is a module that is compiled into
> Apache.  From what I understand, mod_mono requires mod_mono_server which
> answers inbound requests over a TCP/IP socket.  I'm having a hard time
> understanding this design. First off, for every inbound socket opened in
>   

It's how you get the job done. The alternative is shared memory. And 
that's not fun.

> Apache, a new socket is opened for mod_mono_server, along with all the
> overhead on the network stack.  In the Windows world, IIS hosts the CLR in
> process and the two are very tightly integrated.  What's stopping Mono from
> incorporating this design?
>
> I'm assuming Java does not have a separate Java server which Apache forwards
> requests to.
>   
It does. It actually has numerous choices in this department. You can 
front Tomcat with Apache, and many many people do.
> Can't Apache just be configured to natively run Mono applications in
> process?  Would this be a massive architectural change to the Mono runtime? 
> As it stands right now, I don't see a possibility for any MySpace/Facebook
> level web applications running on Mono because I simply can't see mod_mono
> being able to scale to that level.
>   
Would probably be possible would would step all over Apache's threading.
> Perhaps some of the hard core Mono runtime guys can comment, I'm sure
> they're 843x smarter than I am and there's very good reasons why mod_mono
> was designed the way it is, but I'm wondering how this compares with PHP,
> Java, etc which all seem to be tightly integrated in with Apache.  Are there
> any plans to incorporate the Mono runtime directly into Apache, or maybe
> write a highly performant Mono server similar to Sun's Java Web Server?  I'm
> not trying to criticize any design decisions, I'm very new to Mono and UNIX
> server architecture and am just trying to understand the reasons behind
> this.  Thanks!!
>   
Because the Apache guys have no incentive to hard code or go out of 
their way in Apache to work with Mono like the IIS guys do for the CLR. 
And it's better this way.

> Mike
>