Hey folks!
It’s been a year and a half since I last posted about my self-hosted photo gallery here with release v0.15.0.
If you are happy with Immich that’s great! I’m mostly having some fun here and the more the merrier, right? :)
See link for the release notes since v0.15 or just skip to the demo.
Happy to hear any feedback, ideas, suggestions, or comments :)
I don’t know a lot about fastcgi, but looking it up it seems like it also keeps a persistent process running to avoid execution overhead, but I don’t know how that process is managed 🤷♂️
Either way, you could use a supervisor of sorts that shuts down the process/container after some idle time (at least for containers I know some exist) and that should probably work fine (outside of interrupting scanning operations).
I haven’t tried it myself yet though :)
More of less, the good thing about PHP + fastcgi is that it keeps a configure amount of minimum persistent processes (plus a dynamic number) to avoid execution overhead like you said… now there’s an important detail, PHP processes are generic, meaning if you’ve 50 apps hosted in your server they can all be served with just one persistent process. No need to spin up 50 processes for each app like with node/go etc.
Supervisors shutting down containers/processes are good, but starting up is slow compared to the single PHP idle process ready to go for any app. :)
Thanks for the explanation, makes sense! This app relies quite heavily on in-memory caches, so it’s somewhat incompatible with that model :)
That said, I wonder if the startup time would be noticeable. Depends a lot on the configuration, but it shouldn’t take more than a few 100ms (esp. if you use skip_collection_counts).
Not really incompatible, PHP provides configurable shared memory across processes that survive even if fastcgi releases every process and just keeps something idle for new requests.
Oh interesting! Thanks for explaining :)