[clo-devel] Finding out how to set up Trac on fastcgi

[Drew Crampsie]

@Erik : please go ahead, sounds great.

@Hans : We've been running behind squid for 1/2 a year now... it
helped at first, but the real issue is with dynamic pages, and tracd
does not seem to set proper cache control headers for things that
can't/don't  change.

Also, tracd does not allow a robots.txt, so FCGI will allow us to cut
off yahoo and msnbot, who are the real trouble IMO.

Cheers,

drewc

On 7 March 2010 21:41, Hans Hübner <hans.huebner at gmail.com> wrote:
> Erik,
>
> please go ahead and make the change.  I'm not sure if moving to
> FastCGI will really solve the problems, though, as the root issue
> seems to be that we're seeing robots that request pages which create a
> lot of load to generate.  In any case, moving away from tracd is TRT,
> and we can then try to improve things further by using a caching proxy
> like squid.
>
> Whatever you do, please use the Debian packages if at all possible so
> that we have a chance to upgrade.
>
> Thanks,
> Hans
>
> On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 22:27, Erik Huelsmann <ehuels at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Since we seem to have lots of issues with our Trac install (most
>> people find it slow; some find its availability disappointing), I
>> thought I'd look at the Trac website to find out how their dev team
>> advises on these matters. Well, the conclusion is simple: we're using
>> the 'tracd' method of running Trac and this is certainly the only way
>> how *not* to do it.
>>
>> They advise CGI for small sites or FastCGI/WSGI for larger sites. I
>> estimate us to be in the latter category, so I took my own VPS (which
>> is in the former category, but also runs Trac) and configured it for
>> FastCGI. The steps turn out to be quite simple. I volunteer to make
>> the same changes on c-l.net (which drewc already set me up for), but
>> I'm posting here for review. The last thing I'd want is to open up a
>> security hole in the site.
>>
>> Steps are:
>>
>>  * Install mod_fcgid (although I used mod_fastcgi, which is older and
>> not recommended by the Trac team; it works though)
>>  * Add the script handlers and the script alias to the httpd.conf file
>> within the virtual host section for trac.c-l.net:
>>
>>  AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi
>>  ScriptAlias / /path/to/apache/cgi-bin/trac.fcgi/
>>
>>  * copy the 'web/' subdir of the installed Trac into the cgi-bin directory
>>  * copy in the cgi-bin directory "fcgi_frontend.py" to "trac.fcgi"
>>  * add to the trac.fcgi script - before the first 'import' statement:
>>
>>  import os
>>  os.environ['PYTHON_EGG_CACHE'] = "/tmp/httpd-egg-cache"
>>  os.environ['TRAC_ENV_PARENT_DIR'] = "/path/to/parent/trac/project/dirs"
>>
>>  * create /tmp/httpd-egg-cache with the user and group used to run
>> httpd and '700' access settings
>>  * restart apache
>>
>> Comments?
>>
>>
>> The effect of the change is this: by default, a single trac.fcgi
>> application will be loaded - just as with our current situation.
>> However, on high demand, additional instances will be spawned -
>> contrary to the current situation, where a single tracd will try to
>> handle all requests. When the load is over, the number of servers is
>> scaled back to normal (1).
>>
>>
>> Bye,
>>
>> Erik.
>>
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>
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