When executing Perl with FastCGI wrapper in nginx, do I actually get a speed benefit?

Question

Hi, I'm using nginx with this script as FastCGI wrapper, that I start with:

spawn-fcgi -F 3 -u www-data -s /var/run/perl-fcgi.sock -P /var/run/perl-fcgi.pid -- ./perl-fcgi.pl

Now, suppose I have a simple script:

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "Content-type: text/plain\r\n\r\n";
print "hello\n";

The script runs fine, and I see the "hello" when I request /text.pl. But as you can see in line 106 of the FastCGI wrapper, the script gets executed with exec(), so it basically runs in its own Perl environment. Doesn't it ruin the whole concept of FastCGI, when I don't have an already initialized script, but call it independently?

What would be the preferred way of interacting via FastCGI on nginx?

Cheers, --polemon

PS: spawn-fcgi is the program from lighttpd that starts FCGI wrappers and binds them to a socket.

Answer 1

Yes, it ruins the whole concept of FCGI, but by design.

The script you're using is an FCGI to CGI adaptor, designed to work around ngnix' deliberate inability to serve CGI scripts.

To use FCGI "properly," just point ngnix at your FCGI-aware script. On the upside, if ngnix can talk to this FCGI-CGI adaptor, you know it can talk to another FCGI script. Specific server configuration is probably a question for serverfault.