Ben Simon asks questions about web development using PLT Scheme. We answer!

• [W]hat kind of server do I need to reliably run this puppy? Any Linux VM will do to start with. We use Bytemark. Amazon EC2 is another option. I recommend installing PLT from source; don’t rely on your distribution’s package to be up-to-date.
• I wonder what kind of memory usage I’d want to plan for? It really depends on your application but as a guide we’ve run simple apps in 64MBs of memory.
• I’d have to test out PostgreSQL or MySQL db support to make sure it was strong. PostgreSQL is solid, MySQL is not.
• I’d have to sort out what the deployment cycle is like. Just copy over files and restart? Yes. Could I do hot deployment of some kind, by reloading scheme files (one of my favorite tricks in the book)? The web server does have some reloading functionality but we haven’t used it (no good reason; it just isn’t something we do).
• What’s the best production web server arrangement. The PLT web server is solid, but we usually proxy through Apache so we can take advantage of Apache’s flexibility should we need it.