Fast CGI Startup Delay Question

Hi all,

I'm curious if anyone else has faced this issue. I'm running a Django site using FastCGI. I'm relatively unschooled in FCGI, but what I can tell is that when the server is hit, a handful of FCGI scripts are run to support the calls to the Django framework.

My problem is that, with a long period of inactivity, those scripts 'timeout' or, essentially, stop running. After they timeout, hitting the site can take 30 seconds to a minute to respond (presumably, Python is firing up on the server). This is annoying and not terribly acceptable.

In order to mitigate this problem, I'm thinking of writing a small cron job to periodically hit the site, in order to keep the FCGI scripts active.

Is this a reasonable approach? Is there a better approach that others on this forum have taken?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

doug.

I am having this problem too, and had the same idea as you did... did you ever solve this problem in a more elegant manner, or do I need to do a hourly page grab by cron too?

Thanks!