ArcSDE, FastCGI+IIS

[Howard Butler]

On Dec 20, 2006, at 5:29 PM, Mike Saunt wrote
>
> Hi All
>
> Wondering about the users out there who have had experience with  
> ArcSDE +
> FastCGI with IIS or with Apache
>
> We got it all going today which we were very happy about!
>
> I'm wondering if anyone has experience with the setting up of the  
> FASTCGI /
> IIS - we got there eventually (and we'll document and post our  
> experiences)
> but we're now wondering whether the combination of the three will  
> be the
> best or whether we should move ArcSDE / FastCGI / MapServer CGI  
> across onto
> Apache - still running on Windows.  Bascially FastCGI processes  
> seem to bomb
> out every now and then (says SDE client memory errors, network  
> errors) and
> I'm wondering whether the FastCGI on IIS is the most stable.  When  
> looking
> at the mapserv.exe processes in the Task Manager they increase in  
> memory
> until they drop out.
>
> There seems to have been alot more experiences of FastCGI on Apache...
>
> Any thoughts / insights appreciated.
>

On Dec 20, 2006, at 6:17 PM, Paul Ramsey wrote:
> I am pretty sure FastCGI + Apache is the more-tested combination, so
> probably more stable.
> Growing processes is Bad News (tm).  Mapserv.exe shouldn't be leaking
> but perhaps it is.  As a stopgap, set your fcgi workers to shut down
> after 50 or 100 accesses.  That way they shut down cleanly sooner
> rather than nastily later.  You'll spawn workers slightly more often,
> but the penalty isn't too bad amortized over a few hundred requests.

Mike,

I have also had the experience of FastCGI+Apache+SDE hangup and  
crash.  My experience was on Linux, and
while it wasn't always pleasant, the speed improvements were well  
worth it.  I also used Paul's strategy of having
FastCGI shutdown the mapserv processes after about 200 requests.  Use  
a reasonable combination of the
number of requests x the number of clients you expect to service to  
come up with a good number.

There are many places MapServer could be leaking memory, including in  
the SDE code.  MapServer's natural
environment is not in long-running processes.  Another thing to  
consider is each mapserv.exe will eat a license
seat and connection to your SDE server.  This may cause problems for  
other clients you may have connecting
to the server.

It would be greatly appreciated if you could document your  
experiences as far as what you had to do to get
MapServer + FastCGI running on IIS in a comment on <http:// 
mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/howto/fastcgi>.  I will
make sure to incorporate them into the document.  If it is  
straightforward enough, Jeff and I might copy what you
did into the Buildkit, so that support for this makes it into MS4W in  
a future release.

Howard