Tapping the plumbing of a Web server can quite often be plumb silly infoworld.com
Here's my old buddy Nick Petreley taking shots at both princicpals in this forum.
Someone recently contacted me with an interesting problem. His company is building a Web-based application using Microsoft's Windows NT and Internet Information Server (IIS). The team is using Borland International's Delphi to hook into Internet Server API, or ISAPI, for
IIS.
The problem that he's experiencing is simple. IIS is crashing, even under light loads. And the problem doesn't seem to be with the Delphi code. So he wanted to know if another Web server, such as Netscape's Enterprise Server, would be better able to handle the task.
This is actually a fairly common problem. And in most cases, the question shouldn't revolve around which Web server to use, but whether or not it is appropriate to use a Web-server API when a CGI script or program would do.
...
When you use CGI, the program is loaded, used, and then discarded. If a CGI program has a bug, it is much less likely to bring the Web server down because it executes in its own separate program space. Even if a CGI program occasionally crashes, the Web server should continue to hum along on its own.
I've gotten email from someone saying Petreley is a clown. Maybe, but this little bit of advise seems right on to the old Unix hand. Adding code to a (big) server is much, much harder than getting a little standalone program to work. Petreley talks about the reasons, and they are all things I've had experience with. CGI sometimes sucks because people cobble together Unix shell/perl things instead of real programs. But firing up a program just isn't that costly. I was following a Unix/NT debate a while ago where it seemed that a Unix fork/exec to start a new program was quicker that creating an NT thread!
Of course, this kind of argument goes to the heart of my disdain for the "integrated browser" line. Microsoft seems dedicated to "ripping and replacing" large chunks of working code, replacing it with bigger, buggier browser pieces, all for the dubious purpose of giving the users a new interface they don't really want. Oh, the "kill Netscape once and for all" thing is just a curious and unintentional side effect. Despite all indications, it's "what the customers want", and it's no doubt essential to the integrity and uniformity of the Windows experience.
Cheers, Dan.
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