Web Hosting Talk







View Full Version : Ok check this out guys, major perl usage, benifits of mod_perl?


MySiteHost
02-01-2001, 05:59 PM
OH MY FREAKING GOD!

Do you know why, even on a dual PIII server a popular browser based game called monarchy always seemed a little sluggish?

Because they never used mod_perl. They were forcing themselves to have over a gig of ram and dual cpus because they had to have a server running thousands of processes each second!!!!

Doesn't mod_perl make the server run PERL/CGI scripts just like how PHP scripts are executed by default?

It would increase the games functionality by about 1000%!!!
Not to mention cutting the bandwidth usage by at least half

He was telling me how they could have 2 or 3 thousand users logged in at once, (about 10,000 transactions per second)well thats nice, but the second thing he told me blew me away, I asked what kind of server hardware they were using now, and he told me what they did use at shareplay for monarchy instead.

It was a dual PIII 850 with 1024 megs of ram. hey nice system, but the he told me it runs maxed out!
what??!

not for 2 thousand users on a box like that. even with it being cgi based

Then mod_perl hit me
I asked (dare I ask?)

he said they never really looked into it!!
HOLY COW!!!!!

THis is just amazement on a whole bunch of levels
4 years!
How did no one ever suggest it to them before?
Someone must have told them a bunch of BS about it because he also told me that mod_perl is over rated!

Is it? or isn't it?

From what I have seen, it's very true what they say about it. Any success stories here?

Do most hosts compile it into apache by default now? (I would)

ARe there any special calls you have to make to use mod_perl, or does it do what I suspect and start avoiding the external interpreter and use the persistant one right away?

I'd really like to hear about what you guys have to say. Let me know.

Thanks,
Jason

CJB
02-02-2001, 07:49 AM
I have mod_perl running on several servers with perl scripts that are accessed millions of times per day. It does wonders. One of the servers is a P3-800 with 512 megs of RAM, the other a dual P3-800 with a gig of RAM.

However, mod_perl is *very strict* about proper code. The slightest error or poor coding can and will cause problems. If variables aren't set right, the perl scripts will eat up all the RAM on the server and may return invalid cached values for certain variables.

Basically, a move to an effective implementation of mod_perl requires a rewrite of most perl scripts. It's something that is very time consuming and not worthwhile for most purposes.