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Jon Tirsen took some time out of his day surfing in Oz to write about the FastCGI approach to scaling vs. the Java way.

Watching the talk on the Ruby side of the house has been a blast from the past for me. I remember a LONG time ago, testing a Perl based web application under FastCGI and mod_perl.

One of the big problems at the time was damn leaks. One advantage to the old fashion CGI environment, is that a programmer can be very sloppy and get away with it. You forgot to close something? Weren't a good boy with some resource? No matter, the proc will die in a sec anyway.

Moving to the new model changed all of that, and people found a LOT of bad things in their code.

At the time mod_perl was a big winner over FastCGI, and I have been surprised to see how it has grown up.

There are obviously pro's and con's in the process/thread game. That is why Apache 2 has the nice hybrid approach, and you can choose your strategy depending on the platform you are on etc. All processes are not created equal. Ditto for threading. Remember running WLS without the native 'performance pack' enabled? Holy slowness :)

We are also seeing a lot of great things coming out of the JVM vendors such as JRockit to give us the best of both worlds. Hopefully we can all learn from eachother...