Re: Growing Up

On Apr 17, 2007, at 3:55 AM, Clinton Gormley wrote:

Must disagree with you about pound http://www.apsis.ch/pound/index_html
being a PITA to configure and maintain.

Pound is really easy to configure, fast as all hell, and just never goes
down. I've been using it for about 3 years now and I've never ever had
a problem with it.

if its working for you, great ;)

I had some issues when I first tried it, then leaned to nginx which can handle proxy+loadbalancing and serving static content as well.

Just a point of clarification, with reference to this email:
http://marc.info/?l=apache-modperl&m=117595808501296&w=2
(File Uploads using MP2 best practises):

is it reasonable to serve your static files from a mod_perl server, as
long as you have a proxy/pound/squid in front?

My understanding is that the cost of using your mod_perl server to serve
static files is the amount of time that a slow request would tie them
up. However, if your requests are all fast, because your proxy handles
the slow part, then this ceases to be an issue. Am I correct in this
assumption?

I have a bunch of mod_perl servers behind a single pound proxy (plus
failover), and they share the uploaded images via NFS currently,
although I'm considering moving to iSCSI with OCFS2 when I am convinced
of its stability.

Any views on this?

That assumption sounds right -- so long as you have a caching proxy like squid. Not all proxies cache ( i'm pretty sure that pound doesn't ). Any content you can offload from mp should give your app a big boost -- the thing that 'kills' modperl performance is tying up the same apache child used for content generation with 45 .gifs/jpg/pngs and a handful of css/js files.

If you're doing uploaded images over NFS though, chances are you have a lot of images -- which can make caching a bit of a nightmare as you try to balance the cache params. so i'd strongly suggest using a lightweight server (even vanilla apache would be an improvement). alternately, you could consider using amazon's s3 for mass storage with a CDN for distribution. ( i'm constantly told that s3 has uptime/access issues -- your data is safe, but it might not be accessible for an hour ). using a combo of the two gives you reliable storage and distro both for cheap.

// Jonathan Vanasco

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