MapServer+Windows 64 bit+Apache=Crash?

Mar 112010

I developed my MapServer application on Windows 2003 (a virtual 64 bit server running), using MS4W (MapServer for Windows), and had set up TileCache, and some Python scripts to run through Apache. I had managed to crash the set up numerous times in development, but I hadn’t come across any errors not of my own making.

The installation went well  on the production server which was also a 64 bit machine, but was using Windows Server 2008. The site had an unpublicised release as it is still in beta, and from this was getting about 60 – 70 visitors a day.

I use host-tracker.com – a web site monitoring service which lets me know if a site is down, and I was soon made aware that it was.. There were no responses at all coming from Apache, even though the Apache service was still running. Not even HTML pages were returned. Restarting Apache returned the service to normal, but this was happening every other day.

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Setting Up Python on IIS7

Feb 042010

I had already configured Python to run through the Apache webserver on my development server, but after a few issues on the production server (Apache freezing / crashing) I wanted to test running Python scripts with IIS7. The principle aim was to run TileCache through IIS rather than requiring Apache.

Why Not CGI?

While IIS 7 has Fast-CGI installed (see this IIS forum), even better performance can be achieved using ISAPI. This answer from ServerFault has a good summary on why ISAPI should be preferred over than CGI. Not only  performance  should be considered – maintenance should also be taken into account. If a web master or hosting service  is familiar with IIS then they are also likely to be familiar with ISAPI.

From the PyISAPIe site:

The reason ISAPI applications have the capability of being better than CGI or FastCGI applications is mostly due to its tight integration with the web server environment. Instead of initializing an entire program from scratch (in this case, the Python interpreter) every time a request is made for a page, an ISAPI extension only has to provide a function that is called upon every request. For interpreting Python scripts on a per-request basis, this means that the interpreter can be initialized once and used many times, creating a very noticeable performance gain.

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