I was a consultant at Credit Suisse in London in 1999 and I was migrating CSFB's global network from Novell to Microsoft. I had to do things like remotely query user registries to figure out what applications they were running and do things on Novell and windows drive mappings and log stuff into excel spreadsheets based on the data I found. Just a whole mess of cross platform tasks on Novell and Microsoft servers and on the local workstation that was executing the tasks. I found Active State Perl to be invaluable for this.

The next step was to get a linux box under my desk running mysql and instead of logging data into excel I was storing it in MySQL. Linux wasn't allowed on CSFB's network at the time so I snuck it in.

Soon after I landed a job at eToys.com which was a huge mod_perl shop and ended up running the European warehouse management system which was written in Perl. Perrin Harkins and the rest of the web team impressed the hell out of me with what they were achieving on the web front-end. It was then that I realized how scaleable Perl really is.

Since then I've launched around 7 startups of my own all running mod_perl. With the latest Ruby craze I simply am not interested because I know perl can scale effortlessly and mod_perl is now incredibly stable. While the Ruby guys are struggling with Memory leaks or MySQL integration issues, I'm just writing new features.

I'm the founder and CEO of Feedjit.com. We serve over 400 uncached page impressions per second and process around 10,000 mysql TPS on a tiny mod_perl2 cluster. On an average day during peak, the front-end server has around 12,500 concurrent connections.

Mark Maunder.