Cagao has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
We've recently written a mod_perl2 implementation for a site, consisting of a mod_perl+JSON-RPC API backend and mod_perl+TT frontend, 2 separate machines, although not really using many mod_perl features, only the basic $r and $c, for which we could use %ENV instead.
We used mod_perl for caching a large collection of objects in memory on the API side for fast response times.
Colleagues have suggested moving to FastCGI to aid in debugging possible memory leaks and writting tests (unfortunately we don't even have any tests for the modules we use on the backend side).
Would the move to FastCGI make these things any better/easier? We obviously need to get the tests written for our modules we use, but would the switch help with debugging the handlers? All they do is call on the other modules we've written (so far without tests).
No, using FastCGI would not make debugging or testing any easier. There are other unique features on both sides, but I don't know any reason to think debugging or testing would be significantly different. Either way, you have to start up a web server and test it, or you haven't done a realistic test of your full stack.