what exactly does the fcgi gem do?

[ikeo]

I'm asking because it doesn't seem to be necessary to run Ruby on Rails as fcgi on Apache as long as you have Apache mod_fast_cgi

[AllTom]

"vendor/rails/railties/lib/fcgi_handler.rb" begins with "require 'fcgi'" so it looks to me at least that the gem is still required. The fcgi gem is what speaks the FastCGI protocol; it's used to communicate with the FastCGI server (mod_fastcgi).

[chris_fuel]

Apache might like that setup, but lighttpd sure needs the fcgi module for dealing with dispatch.fcgi ( many sad moments dealing with this ).