During the year 2000 I spent a considerable amount of my time working on developing a large eCommerce platform.
The platform involved, as one would expect, nearly every single page to be generated dynamically.

At one point, the web designer altered the way he generated the pages and used SSI to include the side-bar into the table, to move away from frames. The result of this was that every single page served was painfully slower than before.

I used SSI once more at a web hosting company for their main page, and again I found SSI to slow page serving quite noticeably. I ended up using a simple perl CGI script (which ended up being around 15 lines) to do the same task, and the page serving was faster to my senses.

The eCom Apache server (1.3.19 w/mod_perl + SSL) was running on a Sun ULTRA 1 with 196MB of memory (172mHz uSPARC if my memory serves) if anyone wants to make fun out of it.

JP,
-- Alexander Widdlemouse undid his bellybutton and his bum dropped off --