# Old rumours?

**URL:** <https://rubytalk.org/t/old-rumours/27958>\
**Category:** ruby-talk\
**Created:** [4 June 2006 01:16 UTC](https://rubytalk.org/t/old-rumours/27958 "2006-06-04T01:16:26Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Tom\_Allison](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/258eb7/32.png) [@Tom\_Allison](https://rubytalk.org/u/Tom_Allison)\
**Post date:** [4 June 2006 01:16 UTC](https://rubytalk.org/t/old-rumours/27958/1 "2006-06-04T01:16:26Z")

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Please help me confirm/deny some rumours I read on websites recently.  
I'm assuming that things are moving fast enough on Ruby that any opinion article or tutorial you read has a limited shelf life.

rumour one: fastcgi is better than mod\_ruby for most/all websites?  
Largely because of the overhead of mod\_ruby.

rumour two: rails or mod\_ruby will not run under security levels (taint et al)

And now one for me:  
Is there any reason why I couldn't run an apache server with fastcgi hooks for both Perl and Ruby?

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**Author:** ![Kirk\_Haines](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/c6cbf5/32.png) [@Kirk\_Haines](https://rubytalk.org/u/Kirk_Haines)\
**Post date:** [4 June 2006 02:29 UTC](https://rubytalk.org/t/old-rumours/27958/2 "2006-06-04T02:29:32Z")

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> rumour one: fastcgi is better than mod\_ruby for most/all websites?  
> Largely because of the overhead of mod\_ruby.

Maybe. Maybe not. The real answer will depend on one's scenario.

Is one using Rails? Then fastcgi is probably the better choice.

Is one using something else? Maybe fastcgi is the right choice, but maybe  
mod\_ruby is fine. Are you running many different sites and applications off  
of the same server? I would lean more towards fastcgi or maybe a mod\_ruby  
handler that dispatches requests to one or more multithreaded backend  
application processes.

Are you running a homogenous environment for an app that you intend to scale  
to many servers? Run a thin front end that just proxies your requests out to  
a mod\_ruby application instance on a server, and mod\_ruby scales just fine,  
and just might be simpler to setup in that configuration than a fastcgi  
solution.

> rumour two: rails or mod\_ruby will not run under security levels (taint et  
> al)

I have no idea about Rails. SAFE levels and handling of taintedness is  
something you do in your code, though, so I know of no issues with that and  
mod\_ruby.

> Is there any reason why I couldn't run an apache server with fastcgi hooks  
> for both Perl and Ruby?

No reason at all. Fastcgi is fastcgi as far as the webserver is concerned.  
It doesn't care what language the program at the end of that fastcgi pipe is.

Kirk Haines

> **···**
>
> On Saturday 03 June 2006 7:16 pm, Tom Allison wrote: