Speed — Use of FastCGI makes the Movable Type experience on Yahoo! Web hosting services the fastest on the web

With the speed of development of PHP, ASP, and other server side technology, it was interesting to see a company, the likes of Yahoo!, using FastCGI. Maybe this will spark other companies and developers to use FastCGI.

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Basically, the client makes constant requests to the server. Yes, yes, I know that this is very inefficient, but this is a rough draft. Well, rough working draft. The server sends back a NULL flag, which the browser reads and ignores, or it sends back the requested data. This works, but is very inefficient. Normally, server initiated Ajax routines use a polling technique. This involves the client basically pinging the server on regular intervals to request data. I’m doing the same thing but without the time delay.

Everyone seems to be implementing this using some polling technique. Meebo, the now popular Ajax based Web Messenger, uses a polling technique. Anyterm, a terminal emulator, also uses polling.

Polling would work for me, however, it wouldn’t be much different from what I’m already doing. There is an alternative though, HTTP Streaming, which I need to look into. From the little I’ve read, though, it is riddled with complications.

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1. Run the following command at the prompt:
   yum -y install httpd-devel
   You may also download the RPM, or if you’re really adventurous, build it from the source. This installs the httpd-devel package, which is needed for this installation. Most systems may already have this installed, but a fresh default install of Fedora Core 4 does not.
2. Download the “mod_fastcgi” package from FastCGI.com and unzip it to some directory of your choice.
3. Perform the following commands:
   cd mod_fastcgi...
cp Makefile.AP2 Makefile
make top_dir=/etc/httpd
make top_dir=/etc/httpd install
chown -R apache /etc/httpd

   The FastCGI Apache module has now been built.

4. Add following lines to /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf:
   LoadModule fastcgi_module modules/mod_fastcgi.so
Alias /fcgi-bin/ /var/www/fcgi-bin/
<directory /var/www/fcgi-bin/>
SetHandler fastcgi-script
Options +ExecCGI
</directory>
FastCgiConfig .... (if needed)


Now more commands:
mkdir /var/www/fcgi-bin
chmod -R 777 /var/www/fcgi-bin/


Now if you dump your FastCGI scripts to /var/www/fcgi-bin/ you should be able to access them by going to http://www.yourserver.com/fcgi-bin/script.fcgi. Now anything in italics up above you should be able to freely change without screwing up too much. Anything you don’t understand consult the FastCGI documentation and the Apache Configuration documentation.

Good luck guys.

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AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML for web development. Basically you use a some JavaScript to get down below the browser level and control HTTP “GET”s and “POST”s and stuff like that. It’s used by stuff like Google Maps and Google Suggest and GMail. What it enables is basically background activity without the user’s knowledge. This means that you don’t have to do anything really for things to happen. No need for clicks or form submissions and most importantly, no need to reload the entire page when processing data. You can read more about it here.

Now how does this tie in with my job? For the past couple months I’ve been working at a company which runs a legacy program written in ANSI C. The task I’ve been assigned is to enable web access to this program from a normal web browser. On the server end we’re running FASTCGI. This enables a process (the program) to be constantly running while being accessed from the web. Normal CGI programs and PHP scripts are run only one time and then die. FASTCGI avoids that problem.

Now where does AJAX fit in? Communication between the two, of course. So basically, that’s what I’m working on. We made a slight breakthrough today. We got the AJAX script to make repeated accesses to the server and the server to make repeated replies to the client. One thing I’m not quite sure about yet is with speed. It seems to be running rather slowly. I know that this computer that I’m working on needs some work, so I hope that this is where the problem is originating from.

But fear not, all the bugs will be ironed out. Just one quick note. I have found absolutely no documentation of anyone trying to do exactly what we’re trying to do. Yes, people use all this technology on other things or individually, but no one (I’ve found) uses both Fast CGI and AJAX together in the way we’re doing. Is that a good thing? Well, it means that we’re doing some revolutionary and unprecedented and that is always cool. But on the other hand, there is very little documentation on this so we have nothing to fall back on or to work from, so we’re kind out flying blind.

But, keep posted for more. It’s going to be a fun ride.

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