fastcgi, lacking performance over standard cgi

[Gregor Mosheh]

On my dev server I started using MapServer with
FastCGI support. I compiled mapserver with fastcgi
support, and the mapserv.fcgi process is started at
Apache startup. However, there is no performance
increase, even in PostGIS-heavy maps.

Strangely, if I set Apache's LogLevel to info or
debug, I get no diagnostic messages from the new
mapserver. I was of the impression that fcgi would
display debugging info, yes? (I used a test program
from fastcgi.com, and it too displayed no debugging
info even with LogLevel set to debug)

Equally strangely, if I do lsof and grep for the
mapserv's pid, I do see that the mapserver.fcgi is
holding the socket file, and that the webserver is
holding the socket file. But I see no indication that
the mapserver.fcgi is doing anything else persistent,
e.g. database connections. Should I see a few TCP
connections attached to the server process?

Should I see more than one mapserv.fcgi process
spawned?

Does the following httpd.conf paragraph look right, or
am I missing something? (yes, there's a directory
named fcgi where the sockets are stored)

LoadModule fastcgi_module     libexec/mod_fastcgi.so
<IfModule mod_fastcgi.c>
   AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi
   FastCgiIpcDir fcgi
   FastCgiServer cgi-bin/mapserv.fcgi -flush  -socket
mapserver-fcgi.socket
</IfModule>


Any ideas as to where I should look to see a
performance increase? Or is MapServer known to not
benefit from FastCGI, and it's merely for
compatibility?





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