Re: Perl Books to buy

If you're using CGI and DBI together because the boss requires it, I recommend

"What Color is Your Parachute?" (2000 edition)

Or convince your boss that you should be using mod_perl (which can cache the connections through Apache::DBI) instead of CGI.

The startup time to reconnect to a DBI database on each CGI hit is fairly expensive for all but toy sites.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

p.s. yeah, it's a joke post, but the message here is serious. {grin}

Comment on Re: Perl Books to buy

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RE: Re: Perl Books to buy by ncw (Friar) on Sep 03, 2000 at 15:42 UTC
I'll second this! I learnt this the very worst way possible - having to deal with a suddenly popular web site! The poor webserver had a load average of 20 and each CGI was taking 20 seconds or more to complete ;-) Each CGI took about 1 second to run on an unloaded server, but as soon as we were getting more than 1 per second it exhibited this appalling run away behaviour! Now-a-days the webserver deals with over 100,000 mod_perl requests per day, and the load average never creeps above 1! Not everyone uses Apache though (we weren't at the time) which constrains the use of mod_perl (and incidentally is why I stick to Apache::Registry - so the scripts can still run under cgi if necessary on a different webserver). Has anyone done an ISAPI/NSAPI mod_perl(ish) implemetation yet?	[reply]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.

RE: Re: Perl Books to buy
by ncw (Friar) on Sep 03, 2000 at 15:42 UTC

I learnt this the very worst way possible - having to deal with a suddenly popular web site! The poor webserver had a load average of 20 and each CGI was taking 20 seconds or more to complete ;-) Each CGI took about 1 second to run on an unloaded server, but as soon as we were getting more than 1 per second it exhibited this appalling run away behaviour!

Now-a-days the webserver deals with over 100,000 mod_perl requests per day, and the load average never creeps above 1!

Not everyone uses Apache though (we weren't at the time) which constrains the use of mod_perl (and incidentally is why I stick to Apache::Registry - so the scripts can still run under cgi if necessary on a different webserver).

Has anyone done an ISAPI/NSAPI mod_perl(ish) implemetation yet?

[reply]