In an Apache + Mongrel Cluster setup you can base the dispatch on
ProxyPass or on “rewrite to the balancer unless the file exists”.
In theory the ProxyPass approach has the pro of avoiding a stat call.
But the number of dynamic requests is proportionally quite small,
since a page normally means a request for Mongrel and a handful of
requests for static resources. So I wonder whether that’s really a
pro in practice (for a regular website, not Amazon.com).
On the other hand, you need to remember to have httpd.conf and public
subdirectories in sync, and you can’t have a controller called
ImagesController with ProxyPass. The configuration based on
mod_rewrite is more orthogonal.
Does anybody have compared the performance of both approaches?
– fxn