There has got to be a way to run the CGI wrapper under fastcgi or modperl (apache 2). Are there easy to follow instructions describing how to set this up?

AFAIK noone has done this. One immediate problem would be permissions; the CGI wrapper runs setuid to you so it can write to the wiki -- if running in fastcgi/modperl I guess it would run as the web server, unless there's some way to control that. So you'd need to set up the perms differenly, to let the web server commit changes to the wiki.

I've not looked at what code changes fastcgi or modperl would require in ikiwiki. --Joey

Looking at nginx support in dot cgi, I had to figure that out, and it's not so complicated. The hackish way that's documented there right now (and also supported by answers on serverfault.com or other guides), and involves starting up a fcgi wrapper, which I find personnally quite weird.

Otherwise the general idea would be to launch a daemon per site that would have a pool of fastcgi processes to answer requests. The common setup pattern here is that users have a fixed quota of processes running as their user, listening either on the network (hackish: a port need to be allocated for each user) or on a socket (documented above, but then the webserver needs write access).

Perl has had extensive support for FastCGI for quite a while. It seems to me a simple daemon could be written to wrap around the .cgi, it's a common way things are deployed. RT for example can run as a regular CGI, under mod_perl or FastCGI indiscrimenatly, the latter being more reliable and faster. They use Plack to setup that server (see the startup script for an example). But of course, TIMTOWTDI. --anarcat

Also related: multi-thread ikiwiki, rewrite ikiwiki in haskell. --anarcat