[pmwiki-users] Best installation choices for PmWiki on Win2000 with IIS5?

Joachim Durchholz jo at durchholz.org
Thu May 4 00:15:27 CDT 2006


Hartl, Bob schrieb:
> You convinced me to avoid FastCGI, at least until it becomes a more
 > mature product.

Don't hold your breath. It seems to have gone inactive - the last stable 
release was on Nov 2003, and the last snapshot release was sometime 
early 2004.

I don't consider this a problem for Apache 1.3, since it seems to work 
well there. However, on Apache 2, there are issues with zombie processes 
that don't get terminated and fill up RAM until the server goes down 
thrashing. (I heard this is related to signal-handling issues, and 
suspect this will happen if too many visitors abort page loads, but 
frankly, I don't know - I just had to restart Apache several times in 
the weeks since I installed mod_fastcgi, and will back out of that as 
soon as I can.)

I haven't tested mod_fcgid yet, but at least it's under active 
development (the latest release is just two weeks old).

> Within IIS, I will 'isolate' the PMWiki app in its own process, given
> that PHP/ISAPI might be unstable.

Seems like a good strategy.

 > But perhaps the potential instability depends on the
> PMWiki PHP scripts -- and possibly PMWiki might do well with PHP/ISAPI.

One of the things to watch out is that the libraries that PHP is using 
might not be thread-safe. So things might be working smoothly for a long 
time, until you install an upgrade or a new script that makes PHP use 
new library functions which happen to be thread-unsafe, at which point 
the scripts will break under any serious load.
Not a serious issue in itself, but I'm feeling uneasy at planting 
potential timebombs in my installation. When it finally explodes, I 
might have forgotten it's there, and have trouble diagnosing the 
problems correctly.

Regards,
Jo




More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list