- I guess by saing "I have 100+ of the same cart running" you mean it will be used by 100+ customers. Actualy the only important number is the rate of requests for this CGI in the peek time. In my experience unless you do very trivial stuff Perl CGI doesn't scale for rates much more than 1 request per secound. Of course it is very rough approximation. If you want more your need power of mod_perl. Read its guide for more info.
- Flat files doesn't scale for large amounts of data. They will be slow no matter you are using Perl or anything else. So yes, using MySQL (or other SQL database) helps a lot. Probably you may find perfomance of your scripts acceptable once they ported to MySQL so you will not even have to use something like mod_perl.
- This question is hard to answer. Really depends on expected load (i.e. the request rate).
- First of all I'd like to mention that ASP is not a scripting language. It is the way to embed scripting languages in web pages. And yes, you can use Perl with ASP too. As I understand on Win32 you need IIS and ActiveState Perl. On Unix you can use Apache::ASP with mod_perl.
As for Perl vs other scripting languages. I find such discussions quite pointless. IMHO there is nothing you cannot do in Perl you can with other popular scripting languages. And this is true for reverse. Use tool you are most comfortable. If it is Perl then use Perl. If it is, say, PHP or VisualBasic than use them.
--
Ilya Martynov
(http://martynov.org/)
