mod_perl and worker MPM

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

My general question: in what circumstances would you use the worker MPM with mod_perl instead of prefork?

Although I'd like to here any general wisdom people have to offer, my particular situation is: dedicated application servers that load modules at startup and run only ModPerl::Registry scripts, behind a reverse proxy server.

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Comment on mod_perl and worker MPM

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Re: mod_perl and worker MPM by cbrandtbuffalo (Deacon) on Aug 22, 2008 at 12:05 UTC
If you're running on Windows, you'll want to use the worker MPM. On *nix type systems, the path of least resistance is still to stick with prefork. Not all modules are written in a thread-safe manner, so depending on what you are using, you can run into issues. But people have been running tons of CPAN modules under prefork for years.	[reply]
Re^2: mod_perl and worker MPM by perrin (Chancellor) on Aug 22, 2008 at 18:19 UTC
The gist is correct, but Windows actually uses an MPM called mpm_winnt. The worker MPM is not the default on any OS, but can be used on Unixy systems for static files, where it generally outperforms prefork. I like to make my front-end proxy server use the worker MPM for the performance gain on static files.	[reply]