[Xitami] Small modification to ISAPI support

[Russel Olinger]

Ah very cool...others might want to comment on the state/health of the LRWP 
module in Xitami.  Recently it was discovered that there is a bug in both 
the LRWP and FTP modules that prevents a user from launching two seperate 
instances of Xitami at the same time.  In the second instance of Xitami you 
must disable both LRWP and FTP as well as change their default ports to 
something different than the ones being used in the first instance of 
Xitami.  Everyone recommends that you disable the FTP anyway...it never 
worked well to begin with...but the multi-instance LRWP bug hopefully 
doesn't interfere with any of the ISAPI stuff you are attempting to do.

If you get this ISAPI to work with Xitami def let me know...I would be 
highly interested in getting it to work on mine server, however, I am a tad 
put off by having to convert all my perl to some other language - mostly 
because I don't know the other languages.  Even PHP on Xitami is a CGI 
process - not even true PHP.  I have always been aware of the CGI 
performance issue and have always wanted Xitami to support alternative 
methods - even pure PHP would be great.  But Xitami development stopped 
several years ago and even though we loyal Xitami users have tried to get 
iMatix to pick it up again it just hasn't panned out.

-Russel
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "JLIST" <jlist9 at gmail.com>
To: "Russel Olinger" <rolinger1 at hotmail.com>
Cc: <xitami at lists.xitami.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 1:13 PM
Subject: Re[4]: [Xitami] Small modification to ISAPI support


> Hello Russel,
>
>> In the defaults.cfg file add a filter extension ...
>
> I'll try this and report back. Thanks for the suggestion.
>
>> How much faster is ISAPI versus CGI - and what language are the dll's
>> written in?  At least for me, this method you have described is new to 
>> me.
>
> ISAPI is very fast because it'll be just a function call in the same
> Win32 process. Howerver, running ISAPI on Xitami has the overhead of
> going through LRWP, which should still be fairly fast. All the
> approaches (ISAPI, apache modules, LRWP, FastCGI, SCGI, AJP13) avoid
> the overhead of starting a new process (in the CGI's case) and the
> time the process needs for initialization. I don't have the numbers
> but you should be able to find some numbers on the Net. The idea is
> the same for LWRP/FCGI/SCGI/AJP, which is to use a long running
> process.
>
> I think you can write the DLL in any language that can be used to
> write a DLL. I use VC++ or Delphi. This is another reason why ISAPI
> is faster - the DLLs are usually written in compiled languages.
>
> If xitami becomes my main server for Windows (I'm still evaluating),
> I think I'll also use Python to write some LRWP. I've verified that
> the Python module works. They'll usually still be much faster than
> CGIs because the time it takes to process the request are much
> shorter than the time for Windows to start a process. It takes time
> and it taxes the server quite a bit to start processes. That's why
> I generally stay away from CGI.
>
> But I still miss FastCGI/SCGI a lot because, other than the advantages
> that FastCGI has, I have developed some code that run as FCGI/SCGI
> and there are a lot of web development frameworks that support these 
> protocols.
> I think it would be a great idea for xitami to support FCGI/SCGI.
>
> Jack
>
>