[Dancer-users] factory recommendation for web server

[Puneet Kishor]

Thanks Deepak. A few follow-up questions (others, please feel free to 
jump in with your wisdom) --


Deepak Gulati wrote:
> I run Dancer under Starman and use nginx as a reverse caching proxy. I
> also let nginx serve most static files (public/images for example) and
> configure it to gzip the response, add expires headers etc. IMHO
> Dancer should do what it does best and nginx should do all the other
> HTTP related heavy-lifting.

Well, Dancer is not a web server. It still needs a web server. When you 
say that "Dancer should do what it does best and nginx should do all 
other" stuff, I am assuming what you are trying to say is that Nginx 
should server all static files, and <Starman> should server all 
non-static files. (I put <Starman> in <> because one could replace it 
with another web server).

My question is thus -- why need two different servers? Can't Nginx do 
everything? After all, Dancer doesn't serve and content. Dancer creates 
the content, or routes the web server to the correct content. It is the 
web server that serves the content. Doesn't having one web server serve 
static content and the other serve Dancer generated content make your 
web application more complicated?

I have only one web server right now -- just Apache. If I replace 
Apache, I want to replace it with something lighter weight, but equally 
capable, AND, only one program, not multiple programs.

> Starman is probably an overkill for my
> setup.

Why is Starman a probable overkill? Does it consume too many resources?

>
> I run the dancer app using daemontools and the following run script:
>
> #!/bin/sh
>
> export PERL5LIB='/home/ec2-user/TwitterToys/lib'
> exec 2>&1 \
> /usr/local/bin/plackup -s Starman -l 127.0.0.1:5001 -E deployment
> --workers=10 -a /home/ec2-user/TwitterToys/bin/app.pl

One more question -- Since you are running Starman on port 5001 (as 
shown above), what would you do for other apps? Would you have to start 
Starman on a different port for every app that you want to serve? This 
would mean keeping track of different Starman instances and the ports 
they were running on.

>
> Here is a snippet from my nginx config. Hopefully I'll be able to get
> a detailed step by step write-up out by this weekend.
>
> http {
>     gzip  on;
>      gzip_min_length 1024;
>
>      proxy_cache_path /var/cache/nginx levels=1:2 keys_zone=twitter:8m
>    max_size=64m inactive=60m;
>      proxy_temp_path /tmp;
>      proxy_cache_key "$scheme://$host$request_uri";
>      proxy_cache_valid 200 60m;
>
>    server {
>          server_name stupidtwitterstats.com;
>          listen       80;
>
>          location / {
>              proxy_cache twitter;
>              set $do_not_cache 0;
>              if ( $request_uri ~ "^/test$" ) {
>                   set $do_not_cache 1;
>              }
>              proxy_no_cache $do_not_cache;
>              proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:5001;
>              proxy_redirect http://127.0.0.1:5001/ http://$host/;
>              expires 1h;
>          }
>
>          location /images/ {
>              alias /home/ec2-user/TwitterToys/public/images/;
>              expires 30d;
>              access_log off;
>          }
> }
>
> On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 10:12 PM, Puneet Kishor<punk.kish at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> I know there are more than one ways to do it, but I have stuck with Apache
>> for three reasons --
>>
>> - historically Apache has been the front-runner although it may not be
>> anymore;
>>
>> - at least one of the programs I use utilizes CGI, and I am only familiar
>> with Apache's CGI capabilities; and
>>
>> - Apache comes installed by default on my computer, my server, and on most
>> all shared web hosting services.
>>
>> That said, I do have control of my own computer and my server (although no
>> control of the shared service for at least one site). What is, if any, the
>> recommended combination of web servers/proxy servers, etc. that are optimal
>> for Dancer deployment?
>>
>> The deployment guide does give information on many variations, but, if you,
>> the master dancers, could choose any, what would you choose?
>>
>> I see a lot of mention of Nginx and Starman, and am considering
>> experimenting with those.
>>
>> I want speed, ease of installation and configuration, detailed error (and
>> access) logging, and extraction of maximum efficiency with Dancer.
>>
>>
>>
>>



-- 
Puneet Kishor http://punkish.org
Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org
Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org
Science Fellow http://creativecommons.org/about/people/fellows#puneetkishor
Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu
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