Wow. You'd think it would be easy. In fact, it should have been. Compile a module, load it from apache. Recompile PHP with --enable-fastcgi...oh wait, I already had it in there (always thinking ahead!!). Change some apache settings.

Right? Yeah, right. It took two days. I can't even really remember why. The biggest problem was that running make && make install in the mod_fastcgi source was NOT yielding a 'mod_fastcgi.so' as the documentation PROMISED! In fact, it installed mod_fastcgi.la instead, a highly useless file.

So how did the master get out of this bind? Beats me, try asking him. As for me, I had to run 'ld -Bshareable *.o -o mod_fastcgi.so' which is mentioned in some document from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Let me interject and say that the information on the FastCGI website is "not very well documented."

Day 2. I figured, what's the point of FastCGI if it's not set up to connect to a remote App server? Maybe I don't HAVE an external server set up, but we can pretend. Well that's another nightmare. There's a good external FastCGI guide written about it, and guess what it worked. Not really a nightmare at all, come to think of it. Quite pleasant.

All in all, shouldn't have taken 2 days =P (I'm a tinkerer)...but fuck it, I have FastCGI now, ready to connect to all those App servers I have churning away in the background (one day).

In all the excitement, I also compiled and installed the apache worker-MPM. A few tests with ab didn't really show any noticeable difference. But threads are cool, right?

Next up: figure out how to configure Apache to pass all requests ending in .php (whether the file exists on the web server or not) to our "app" server. Is this possible?