February 21, 2005

For all you lovers of CGI out there -- I've got a question for you...

Why?

Thats it, thats the question. A simple one word question. If you're unsure as to what I mean let me expand it a bit.

Why in the hell would you ever want to put yourself in that type of programming and server performance hell as to continue to keep building applications in this single-threaded nightmare of a technology? I don't get it. Its the most God-Awful thing I have *EVER* had to deal with from a server programming stand point. I'm not saying that I'm not missing something. I'm just saying if I am it sure the hell isn't obvious.

Please, if you have the answer... keep it to yourself... Cuz' I don't want to hear about why you have justified such a horrific idea as to think you can squeeze any amount of performance out of that... that... that.... that thingawhatever you wanta call it. Its *AWFUL*!!!

Oh, and by the way...

If you are trying to track-back my server and have discovered the capability no longer exists, returning a 404 error code instead of a scrap of XML to play with when your through. Thats 'cuz I just *RIPPED* out mt-tb.cgi from its single-threaded stranglehold on my server as some porn spammer decided to single ping, ping, ping, my single-threaded server to death all morning long. Apparently either MovableType, Apache, or Suse Linux 9.1 has been default configured to kill the entire server if a process takes up too much processor for too much time or with too many consecutive threads or something else all together. But whatever it is (and no, I don't plan on spending the time to track it down -- if you know, please don't tell me -- I don't want to know) its caused my server here in Salt Lake to kill all processes and terminate itself from existence 5 times. I'm done. Thats it! *NO_MORE_CGI* for me! Well, except for XSLTWiki... But you can't send TrackBack pings to the MediaWiki software so I'm feeling pretty safe on that one. But all of my blog stuff is getting moved to home-brewed ASP.NET-based code running into Mono through Apache, via mod_mono. Once I have reached a level of production ready code then I plan to move the busier sites this server is serving up to the main x2x2x.org servers and continue to use this one as my research and development server as it has been a fantastic server in that regards. But as far as allowing the MovableType cgi-script access to this machine again....

Not in a million *FUCKING* years!

Peace, love, and happy Multi-Threaded server apps to you all :)