snapdragon has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm looking into developing a cgi interface into a billing system. Normally I'd handle caching, DB connection pooling, and general performance tuning though mod_perl. Of these I'm most concerned about getting DB persistance addressed. The requirements of this project is that I develop this on a Win32 platform, that will be running Apache.

Virtually all my experience of development is on Unix platforms, so this in itself will be quite a challenge. I know that Apache runs as a multi-threaded process under windows, not the *nix multi process model. mod_perl doesn't run multi-threaded. You can only ever run one mod_perl process on windows which means all mod_perl calls have to be serialised.

So what's the best way of doing this? Do I:

As ever, any help will be greatly appreciated....

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: DB persistance in win32
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Mar 29, 2003 at 11:07 UTC

    You may find the discussion regarding mod_perl1, it's limitations and workarounds here useful.

    The discussion also points to using mod_perl_2 in conjunction with Perl 5.8, which uses Win32 native threads to get around most of the mod_perl_1 limitations, but also warns that it is currently considered an alpha solution. Further discussion of the what, why and how can be found here.

    Examine what is said, not who speaks.
    1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
    2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible
    3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
    Arthur C. Clarke.
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Re: DB persistance in win32
by PodMaster (Abbot) on Mar 29, 2003 at 10:58 UTC
    "...one mod_perl process on windows which means all mod_perl calls have to be serialised."

    How do you figure?

    Just use mod_perl2. http://perl.apache.org/docs/2.0/os/win32/install.html

    MJD says you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!
    I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6x+5.8x. I take requests.
    ** The Third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.

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Re: DB persistance in win32
by Jaap (Curate) on Mar 29, 2003 at 10:14 UTC
    If it's true that you can only run 1 mod_perl process/thread on win32 (which i didn't know), then what problems do you expect if you do use it?

    Is it the time a new incomming connection has to wait for the previous request to be finished or is there something else problematic about the sreialisation?
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Re: DB persistance in win32
by Lhamo Latso (Scribe) on Mar 30, 2003 at 02:06 UTC

    The multithreading of mod_perl 2.0 is certainly a great solution for Win32, but I can lend some of my trouble to your thought process.

    I was unable to access many of the common Apache Perl API's in version 2.0. Things like $r->server_root_relative didn't seem to be available yet. After much effort, and very limited success, I went back to developing under apache 1.3.27 and mod_perl 1.27. The future can only be an improved API.

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