Escaping the Black Hole

An advice for optimizing the performance of Mapserver was to use FastCGI.

1. I installed the FastCGI library with yast and downloaded the Apache2 module mod_fastcgi-2.4.6.tar.gz. After extracting it, I followed the configure, make, make install dance as described. Unfortunately the compiler complained about some missing stuff and I couldn´t figure out how to get the module installed. I gave it up and tried the mod_fcgid module from Apache itself that seemed to be quite similar.

3. I extracted mod_fcgid-2.3.4.tar.gz to my home directory and followed the steps described in the README:
# APXS=/usr/sbin/apxs2 ./configure.apxs
# and following 'make'
The compiler returned the same problem and complained about a missing mpm.h and mpm_default.h in /usr/include/apache2.

I came around the problem by symlinking both files using
# ln -s ../apache2-prefork/mpm.h mpm.h
# ln -s ../apache2-prefork/mpm_default.h mpm_default.h

After doing that both modules were build successfully into /usr/lib64/apache2.

4. I added a configuration file to load the module in /etc/apache2/conf.d with the following entry:
LoadModule fastcgi_module /usr/lib64/apache2/mod_fastcgi.so

5. I restarted Apache with apache2ctl restart. The error_log in /var/log/apache2/ indicates that the module was loaded successfully:
Apache/2.2.10 (Linux/SUSE) mod_ssl/2.2.10 OpenSSL/0.9.8h mod_fastcgi/2.4.6 Phusion_Passenger/2.2.5 configured -- resuming normal operations