Launch FastCGI process?

[Phillip Oldham]

jlist9 wrote:
> Hi Igor,
>
> In fact, if it's integrated it is already better :-)
>
> Although lighttpd has the spawn-fcgi tool, it still integrates this
> functionality into lighttpd itself and this makes setting up simple 
> servers and managing them a lot more easier!
>   
AFAIK lighty just "talks" to the spawnfcgi daemon. Nginx could maybe do 
the same with a plugin, but it wouldn't be managing the fastcgi 
processes itself.
> As a matter of fact, I don't quite understand why the replies so far are mostly
> negative about integrating a nice feature into nginx. I think a lot of lighttpd
> users are using this feature and like it a lot. It's only an option in lighttpd
> and you don't have to use it. Phillip mentioned that if a child process is
> bad it may bring down the web server. I have never seen this myself.
>   
I had this issue consistently while using lighttpd+spawnfcgi+PHP5. 
PHP+spawnfcgi would leak memory slowly filling out what was available, 
and lighty would balk when a connection couldn't be made or a response 
wasn't returned correctly. This was a couple of years ago now; things 
might've changed. I remember plastering the boards and even emailing Jan 
directly with no results. Nginx had just made some headlines, so I 
switched. We now use it on 6 production servers with PHP, Python, and 
Java backends and haven't had *any* problems that weren't down to silly 
misconfigurations (on my part - resolved with help from this amazing 
maillist!).
> What I have seen is, if the fcgi process throws an exception and exits,
> lighttpd automatically starts another one. How nice! I really hope nginx
> does it, too!
>   
Well, no - nginx doesn't do anything about it other than capture the 
error and move on. That's the job of the process manager. Its the same 
in lighttpd; spawnfcgi manages the fcgi processes, not lighttpd. All 
you're doing is swapping spawnfcgi for supervisord (or God, or 
whatever). As Roger mentions, the reason to use a process manager is to 
separate concerns. Nginx is concerned with serving content (either from 
disk or from an upstream), process managers are concerned with keeping 
processes running. Its part of the unix philosophy: "Write programs that 
do one thing and do it well."