So after hours of searching and tweaking, I finally got the answer I never wanted: it’s not possible to have apache serve mod_fastcgi requests through it’s own reverse proxy (ie load-balance mod_fastcgi). I know this is incorrect. But it had taken me so long and wasted so much time getting to the point where I was almost as clueless as when I started, that I took drastic action.

I installed lighttpd. I already had the FastCGI setup running, not to mention I got a new Linode for testing remote PHP. The only problem was that I couldn’t load balance between my slack box (web server) and my new linode (debian app server). BTW I chose Debian because the image was smaller and from what I know, it’s essentially the same as Slack. I really haven’t had ANY problems moving to it yet, and let’s face it, Deb is a lot more standard. Installing PHP was a bitch, but that’s what apt-get is for (no, I compiled PHP…but I’ll be damned if I’m going to hand compile all the stupid dependencies).

Anyway, within 20 minutes, lighttpd had PHP running through FastCGI load balanced between two servers. Needless to say, I fell in love. Not to mention all the information I was inundated with along the way about how small and lean lighttpd is swayed this choice a little.

So as far as I know, beeets is running great on both of its “new” servers and loving it.

There was a bit of trouble getting used to the new URL rewriting scheme, but generally instead of doing apache’s

RewriteCond blahblah !-f

You can just do url-rewrite(‘(images|css|js)’ => ‘$0′)

(this is a horrible oversimplification, but you get the idea)…you write the URLs you DON’T want to be rewritten to $0. Works wonders.

All that’s left is some cache-control headers (I’m crazy about them, if you can’t tell yet), and some speed testing. I’m excited to see if lighttpd is actually faster than apache under ab.

Next up, Capistrano.