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Grex > Coop11 > #51: Enabling CGI scripts for Grex users
Author Message
5 new of 59 responses total.
ryan
response 55 of 59: Mark Unseen   Apr 5 23:52 UTC 1999
This response has been erased.

prp
response 56 of 59: Mark Unseen   Apr 6 03:47 UTC 1999
From 51: a normal program can be run only by someone who is logged in,
a CGI script can be run by anyone on the Internet.

Point of 52: A normal program can be run by anyone on the Internet. 

The big difference is that a CGI script makes it easier, at least if it
is a good one.  This may cause some system load, but that's good as long 
as it doesn't cause too much load.  I imagine that anyone who created a
page that got 20,000 hits/week would be very happy.  And that's less than
two/minute.
arthurp
response 57 of 59: Mark Unseen   Apr 6 13:56 UTC 1999
From 51:  a normal program can be run by someone logged in,
 a CGI can be run by anyone on the internet.

Point of 52:  A normal program can be run by anyone on the internet if 
and only if they have successfully contended for one of the 70 or so 
login connections available on Grex.

Programs are throttled by limits on Grex.  CGI's are not throttled.  I 
once made a webpage here that completely swamped Grex and it had no 
CGIs.  It received a couple hundred hits.

Say it would be really handy if I had a multi search engine whose 
expression parsing and results display I could control.  I'll make a 
multi search engine in my home.  I"ll only use it myself and tell a 
couple friends.  It won't use much of Grex's CPU.  It won't swamp the 
like or raise the load so high mail never gets delivered.  I promise.
devnull
response 58 of 59: Mark Unseen   Apr 11 04:36 UTC 1999
Enabling cgi scripts would be reasonable, if appropriate resource limiting
is done.

Basically, I suspect that with a sane limit on the number of hits per owning
account per day, and some sort of cpu time limit for processing each of those
hits (not elapsed time; time spent actually doing something on a CPU), you
probably would end up offering a useful service without it swamping the
machine.

(And I'm thinking 100 hits per day per user, and 10 seconds per process,
might be the right amount.)

On a 4 processor system, that means a user could use .289% of grex's cpu
time through CGI abuse.

Now, in practice, the problem we run into is taht the staff will have to
spend time setting this up, and dealing with the fact that every now and
then, people *will* write cgi code that causes problems.  I think this
can be done, if staff time is available, and I doubt that it really is.
mdw
response 59 of 59: Mark Unseen   Apr 13 05:52 UTC 1999
One of the things I don't like thinking about is a forkbomb cgi.
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