mod_cgi for nginx - anyone?

[Igor Sysoev]

On Sat, Feb 07, 2009 at 02:33:09AM -0800, mike wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 2:16 AM, Igor Sysoev <is at rambler-co.ru> wrote:
> 
> > nginx is not general purpose server, it's rather highload server.
> > CGI is not compatible with highload: if you run Apache/CGI, then CGI
> > will became bottleneck much earlier than Apache.
> >
> > There are two ways to implement CGI inside nginx:
> >
> > 1) simple one: just fork()ing worker process that has received a request
> > for CGI and exec() a CGI program. It's simple enough, but has a lot
> > of overhead. Besides CGI programs will run with worker privilege only.
> 
> and it requires the CGI program to be modified, yeah?

No.

> > 2) complex way: to run a special CGI manager (probably with root privilege
> > as master process) and to pass it requests/sockets using Unix domain sockets.
> > Then the manager can fork/exec CGI programs with required privileges
> > and with minimal overhead to nginx workers.
> >
> > The second way will require some time to program, but the outcome will
> > be much similar like just proxying to mini_httpd
> > ( http://acme.com/software/mini_httpd/ ).
> 
> this is like starting out with something like php-fpm, and morphing
> into a small httpd?

No, the special CGI manager is a nginx process that fork()ed by master nginx
process (like worker processes). The communication protocol between
workers and the manager is not HTTP: a worker starts to handle a request,
then it sees that the request should be handled by CGI, something like

      location /mailman/ {
           cgi_script  ...;
           cgi_user    ...;
           ...
      }

and pass the request and client socket to the manager.

> > BTW, it seems that using Apache with several worker processes (2-5) for
> > bugzilla, mailman, etc. will not consume much CPU/memory: look top.
> 
> I'm just looking at it from simplifying the system administration.
> 
> I know it is not the most performant, those tools are not my preferred
> ones, I just have to support hosting them right now...

I understand this, but currently nginx has more priority tasks.


-- 
Igor Sysoev
http://sysoev.ru/en/