I have been assigned the unfortunate task of improving the performance of a commercial Perl application. We have the source to this application, and are free to make modifications to it. However, we do not want to make very many major modifications, in hopes of being able to upgrade to new versions of the product in the future.

To give you a general idea of the issue, the application takes approximately 10 seconds to generate each page. Between 3 and 5 seconds is an "acceptable" load time, so there's a lot of work to do. I've made optimizations where possible, trying to improve the application's use of the database, but I've only shaved off a few milliseconds here and there. Again, I've limited myself becase I want to be able to upgrade later.

The overriding problem is that the application feels like it was written for Perl 4. By that I mean that there are lots of global variables, many local variables, and definitely no use strict. That makes running the application in mod_perl fairly difficult, if not impossible. Apache::Registry definitely seems to be out. Apache::PerlRun looks like my best bet. I've run across Good place to learn Apache::PerlRun, but given that the application feels like Perl 4 code, I am not very hopeful.

Finally, FastCGI and SpeedyCGI are probably out of the question because our systems group won't support either.

Do you think I have any options? I would prefer not to have to recommend a new hardware purchase.

Thanks,
-Daniel

In reply to Speeding up commercial Web applications by PotPieMan

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