SliceHost: Full Disclosure
August 7, 2007
As of August 5, 2007 the server that hosts SuperJared.com is provided gratis, courtesy of SliceHost. The agreement only requires that I continue to write about Django and SliceHost as before.
I firmly believe that SliceHost has a solid setup and a bright future. This viewpoint hasn’t changed in lieu of the new arrangement (as my previous posts will attest) and I will attempt to be as unbiased as possible in future reporting.
The first step in honest reporting is to be fully transparent. If you have any questions, please leave a comment or email me.
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Comments
I have been eyeing slicehost for a while. I would love to know which plan you have and what your setup is. For example; Are you running your database server on the slice or remotely? How many django sites are you running off of your slice?
Posted by Douglas
Douglas,
I'm running everything on the same 256MB Slice: Apache (mod_python), MySQL, and Nginx as a proxy front-end. I will be writing more about my setup soon.
Currently I only have the one Django site on this server, but it'd definitely be able to handle more, especially since I'm using mod_python over FastCGI.
Posted by SuperJared
I know you've talked about it before but I really don't understand how mod_python allows you to host more django apps than fastcgi. Doesn't each django app need it's own memory for the interpreter whether it's spawned by mod_python or fastcgi?
Posted by sandro
Sandro,
I'm going to use a server at work as an example. We have around 15 Django-powered sites on one server. Some are complex, some aren't. Each one is run through mod_python, the directives all set in the same virtual hosts file. At this point I have 10 Apache processes running, each of which consuming roughly 20-30M apiece.
Running a Django app via FastCGI requires the start of its own individual FastCGI daemon, which, depending on your app can be 5-20MB apiece. For optimal performance you'd want to have at least two FastCGI children, which brings your process total to 3.
Now, let's say we start each of the 15 sites above using FastCGI and each process uses 10MB, we have:
15 sites * (10MB * 3 processes) = 450MB
Having FastCGI setup this way uses 150MB more RAM than my Apache method. Yes, you can reduce the amount of processes in FastCGI, but you can do the same with Apache -- both at a detriment to your performance.
It's early, so I've probably skipped something but this should give you an idea of what I'm talking about.
Posted by SuperJared