You have at that point many options.
  1. Buy more RAM.
  2. Reconfigure Apache to have fewer processes.
  3. Identify parts of your system that take up the most memory. Then you can:
    1. Rewrite them to be less memory intensive.
    2. Turn them back to CGI.
    3. Use a dedicated serving process (eg FastCGI) for those components.
    4. Use shared memory segments.
  4. Reduce the number of requests that a given child will handle before restarting.
  5. Move to an OS with on demand paging (rather than per process) and give it lots of temp space. (This mainly applies if you are not already using some form of *nix.)
  6. Buy faster hard drives.
There is no universal solution to poor performance. However the vast majority of the time mod_perl is a massive improvement over straight CGI. Time and money spent optimizing CGIs to run faster is typically penny wise and pound foolish. Hardware is cheap. With the spare hardware from the dotbombs, it is really cheap. Unless you are doing something ridiculous, the odds are very good that hardware is the best solution at hand.

In reply to Re (tilly) 3: Speed, and my sanity. by tilly
in thread Speed, and my sanity. by Dylan

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