Interesting meditation!

I have another solution. Keeping images, maybe large ones, in memory or in a database forces you to use mod_perl to deliver them: you have a long print that can be instead handled by apache itself. You are replicating content generation and embedding security inside this phase of apache's life cycle.

What you need instead is authentication, authorization and access control. Following this route you need 'only' to create directories with access rights embedded in their names. A dedicated access control can give authorization to display some content to the real apache, gaining in speed and modularity.

If you need to share images between many servers I think NFS fyle system is a better option. Some discussions about this option can be found on mod_perl mailing list.

Hope this helps. Ciao, Valerio

In reply to Re: mod_perl web app design considerations by valdez
in thread mod_perl web app design considerations by vladb

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