Beginner's luck with mod

So I have been using perl at work for about 4 years now. My level is definately novice. Use it for quite a few things, but one of them always was an internal website.

I learned perl through no formal method, and basically had taken over a large group of cgi-bin perl stuff. The internal site, has, in the last year or so, started housing and displaying a very large amount of content. The code has basically been nothing but maintained by me over the years, with a few features thrown in here and there for whatever reason. As the site's complexity grew, it had been getting very slow (some pages were taking upwards of 4/5 seconds to load)

Now, to the point of this meditation...

It is no surprise that when researching around the web about perl/cgi scripts, one often gets referred to mod_perl. About a week ago i decided to figure out what it was all about and see if it would work for the aforementioned site.

How do you quantify something that installs so easy (I was able to use PPM to install it), and immediately returns such a gain in performance? I feel like i was living in the dark ages running stuff in cgi. After adjusting some of the code to work in a mod_perl environment, the site is running so fast there's barely a load time for any of the pages, and the others at work who use it (non-perl weirdos, geez) are amazed at the gains in performance.

That is all, just a perl/mod_perl success story for my fellow monks

Comment on Beginner's luck with mod_perl

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Re: Beginner's luck with mod_perl by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Jun 12, 2008 at 15:12 UTC
Nice to here positives about Perl and cgi. But, didn't you hear ... cpu cycles don't matter. You coulda just thrown some bigger hardware at it :) Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error. "Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority". In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice. "Too many [] have been sedated by an oppressive environment of political correctness and risk aversion."	[reply]
Re^2: Beginner's luck with mod_perl by technojosh (Priest) on Jun 12, 2008 at 15:58 UTC
hehe, believe me I'd LOVE to throw bigger/better/faster hardware at it ;) still though, from a budget/manager's perspective, i'd think mine would rather hear that i just installed module (for free) and it took me 15 minutes, as opposed to getting a Purchase Order from me for a new server machine...(oh how i have tried though!)	[reply]
Re^3: Beginner's luck with mod_perl by Herkum (Parson) on Jun 12, 2008 at 19:47 UTC
i'd think mine would rather hear that i just installed module (for free) and it took me 15 minutes You never say that! You say that wrote it from scratch based upon some theories you read on the internet. It will take you a week to implement but will double performance. That will give you time to play WOW without them bothering you in the mean time... :)	[reply]
Re^2: Beginner's luck with mod_perl by Gavin (Archbishop) on Jun 12, 2008 at 15:30 UTC
If you had some in the first place! I found a similar thing myself, and was amazed at the difference in "page loading" it was just like a hanging brake had been freed off.	[reply]
Re: Beginner's luck with mod_perl by perrin (Chancellor) on Jun 12, 2008 at 16:09 UTC
Great success story! Welcome to mod_perl, and feel free to join us on the mod_perl mailing list any time.	[reply]
Re^2: Beginner's luck with mod_perl by monarch (Priest) on Jun 13, 2008 at 00:00 UTC
I especially like perrin's contributions to the prevelance of mod_perl thread about FastCGI. After reading his posts in that thread I started using FastCGI with CGI::Fast and must say I love it. The hardest thing about mod_perl, I find, is debugging. At least with CGI::Fast I can run a script like an ordinary CGI script from the command line in debug mode.	[reply]
Re^3: Beginner's luck with mod_perl by perrin (Chancellor) on Jun 13, 2008 at 00:57 UTC
I didn't mean to imply with that post that people who want to write CGI-compatible scripts should avoid mod_perl. Any script you write that runs under CGI and FastCGI should work under mod_perl without modifications.	[reply]