I have, for a long time now, been writing a perl program (gasp!:).

It is called The Manifold Engine, and it does many things, and will someday do *everything* for my web site. Mainly, it parses and 'compiles' my pages. (Manifold: having many forms or features) It gives no error messages now, with -W and use strict, and is nice to work with. some of things it does are: SSI's, custom tags like <@TAG@> could equal "The chickens, they scare the children", and I have 'Commands', like <$randomquote$=1$> that returns a random quote. See, it is the entire site, like index.pl, I guess. page=pagename, or form=login, etc.

What I want to know is, is there anyway to make such a insanely large thing (400 lines, I think) run faster? I've not had to put any load on it, only me testing it, and it takes only 2 secs longer than a static html page of exact same size.

I *have* tried to do this myself, by the way. it has many 'modes' (colors), and instead of "if mode is this, do this, elsif this, do that" etc, I did this: 

 
if (defined($params{modes}->{$mode})) {
$params{modes}->{$mode}->();
}

[download]
Also, I am going to use MySQL instead of plain text files, for larger amounts of data (news boards, downloads, fun things), and my server will be using mod_perl, soon. I've used most of the ideas (all?) from the Camel partaining to speed. Also, I would like to know if this All In One Perl CGI, is a bad idea.. Is it the work of a mad man?

I can post a link, if someone wants to view it.
Sorry if this post was long.
If anything is unclear, sorry.
I thank you for taking the time to help crazy perl. :) P.S. Oh yeah, loading it from localhost, it takes 1/2 second to load... maybe it is fast, but the server it will be running on is not a 512mb system with a 1ghz processor, like my home system.

In reply to Speed, and my sanity. by Dylan

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