At 2:57 PM +0200 6/22/2001, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>I have heard, time and time again, that Perl is great for scripting
>small websites, but that, for large websites, with lots of
>simultaneous connections, you should better use an application
>server + servlets, or even better, WebObjects. What do you all think
>about this?
I did some evaluations about a year ago comparing a couple of
different servlet engines, Apache+mod_perl, MS-IIS with VB, and a few
other systems. My experience was that apache with mod_perl was better
at handling load than those other systems. The servlet systems, while
very nice to program in, seemed to have bandwidth problems moving
data from the servlet engine to the web server (and generally needed
ridiculous amounts of RAM). The NT solutions were between the Java
systems and the apache+mod_perl environment. Granted, when we did
these tests we had more experience with perl/apache than the other
systems, but we didn't spend a lot of time tuning the perl/apache
system, whereas we spent a lot of time trying to tune the other
systems.
Also, as a point of reference, the Lycos Mail Address Book
service is now entirely run on apache+mod_perl using the HTML::Mason
package that Ken Williams mentioned for the front ends, and some
custom perl modules + Apache::DBI on the backends. We've also used
apache+mod_perl to implement a registration and login service that
used to do authentications for the entire Lycos Network, so I can
definitively state that mod_perl is a great system for building large
sites.
To bring this somewhat more back on-topic, I've even managed
(without too much difficulty) to get our entire front-end system
running locally on my MacOS X machine, including a custom
authentication library we've built (the system is primarily developed
for Solaris, but we've also got developers using Linux). Using BBEdit
to edit my source files and run my server directly on my machine
makes me so much happier *and* more productive!
Benjamin Turner
--
Benjamin John Turner | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.usfca.edu/turner/ | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"The happiest of people don't necessarily have the best of
everything; they just make the most of everything that comes along
their way."
