Groups | Search | Server Info | Keyboard shortcuts | Login | Register [http] [https] [nntp] [nntps]

Groups > comp.lang.forth > #10819

FastCGI-like stuff and Forth

Show all headers | View raw

CGI is a way to invoke server-side programs (written in an arbitrary
language) from a web server.  It starts a process for every request
(page view), which can be expensive if the page is viewed a lot
(especially since Perl was used a lot for this stuff in the early
days, and it did not use to be the fastest system when it comes to
startup times).  That's why FastCGI, mod_perl and similar things were
introduced; FastCGI uses one process for multiple requests, mod_perl
runs in an Apache process.

While Gforth startup times are not bad (about 8ms on a 3GHz Core2
Duo), you might still worry what happens if you get slashdotted, so I
thought about how one might reduce the process startup overhead.

One could do it in the FastCGI way, starting a Forth process that then
deals with multiple requests (and after a number of requests, the
process is thrown away and a new one is started to mitigate memory
leaks and other bugs); this still would require writing the Forth
program in a way that the state after a request is usable for another
request.

However, I think that it would be nicer to start up Gforth, load the
program, and then, for every request, fork off a copy of the
initialized Gforth process; the benefit is that this is much cheaper
than starting Gforth from scratch for every request, while still
delivering almost all of the advantages of this approach (requests are
not affected by other requests).  One can probably still use the
FastCGI protocol for this, or one could just use plain CGI with small
program that passes the request on to the Forth dispatch process.

- anton
-- 
M. Anton Ertl  http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
comp.lang.forth FAQs: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/faq/toc.html
     New standard: http://www.forth200x.org/forth200x.html
   EuroForth 2011: http://www.euroforth.org/ef11/

Back to comp.lang.forth | Previous | Next — Next in thread | Find similar

Thread

FastCGI-like stuff and Forth anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2012-04-03 13:28 +0000
  Re: FastCGI-like stuff and Forth Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2012-04-03 11:44 -0700
    Re: FastCGI-like stuff and Forth Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2012-04-03 21:46 +0200
      Re: FastCGI-like stuff and Forth Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2012-04-03 13:25 -0700
        Re: FastCGI-like stuff and Forth Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2012-04-03 22:35 +0200
          Re: FastCGI-like stuff and Forth Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2012-04-04 02:20 -0700
            Re: FastCGI-like stuff and Forth Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2012-04-04 05:52 -0500
              Re: FastCGI-like stuff and Forth Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2012-04-05 00:03 -0700
                Re: FastCGI-like stuff and Forth Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2012-04-05 03:03 -0500
                Re: FastCGI-like stuff and Forth Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2012-04-05 10:42 -0700
                Re: FastCGI-like stuff and Forth Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2012-04-06 06:30 -0500
                Re: FastCGI-like stuff and Forth Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2012-04-07 01:44 -0700
                Re: FastCGI-like stuff and Forth Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2012-04-07 19:04 -0500
                Re: FastCGI-like stuff and Forth Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2012-04-07 17:40 -0700
        Re: FastCGI-like stuff and Forth quiet_lad <gavcomedy@gmail.com> - 2012-04-05 13:37 -0700
    Re: FastCGI-like stuff and Forth Albert van der Horst <albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl> - 2012-04-04 13:20 +0000
      Re: FastCGI-like stuff and Forth Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2012-04-04 11:20 -0700
    Re: FastCGI-like stuff and Forth anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2012-04-04 13:42 +0000
  Re: FastCGI-like stuff and Forth Spam@ControlQ.com - 2012-04-04 17:00 -0400
  Re: FastCGI-like stuff and Forth quiet_lad <gavcomedy@gmail.com> - 2012-04-05 13:36 -0700
  Re: FastCGI-like stuff and Forth quiet_lad <gavcomedy@gmail.com> - 2012-04-13 23:10 -0700

csiph-web