On Sat, 15 Apr 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> > It is very memory inneffecient basically. Each process of apache has
> > it's registry which holds the compiled perl scripts in..., a copy of
> > each for each process. This has become an issue for one of the
> > companies that I work for, and I noted from monitoring the list that
> > some people have apache processes that are upwards of 25Megs, which is
> > frankly ridiculous.
>
Originally I thought this as well.. but, using mod_rewrite, the ratio
of heavy to light processes can be very high.. some solid figures here:
our site (dslreports) now handles 200,000 pages a day, every single one
of them is dynamically generated.. at peak this is 10-20 modperl pages
a second.. to handle this, we have httpd modperl with MIN, MAX
and LIMIT of just 8(!) modperl processes, 2 php httpds (just for true type
font rendering ;-) and as many front-end httpds (mod_rewrite and mod_proxy)
as required (usually about 100 but can be 200-300 at times). There is
almost never all 8 modperls running at one time.. even long pages fit
in the buffers between back end, mod_proxy, and front end meaning its
hard to catch mod perl in the act of actually servicing requests.
On the same box is mysql (40-60 daemons), constant mail handling, various
other custom perl daemons and utilities, MRTG monitoring of 100s of IP
addresses, a busy ultimate bulletin board (plain cgi - ugh), development
and testing as well sometimes.
This is all handled by two 450mhz processors and 1gig of memory, no swapping,
half of the memory ends up being used by linux for disk caching.. modperl
uses up about 256mb I suppose. With that much traffic, memory leaks, and the
odd SQL query that reads too much, the modperl processes grow slowly to about
40mb each, but get reborn, every 1000 requests, at 28mb again. The load
average hovers around 5.0
I read today drkoop (while going broke) now does 600k pages per day..
I bet they have a couple of million bucks worth of solaris, oracle and IIS,
serving out mainly static content? whats the price/performance problem
with modperl again?
So I find this setup very stable and very flexible .. and would not swap it
for a pool of interpreters, or a multi-threaded server for all the tea
in china .. because I dont think either of those models (elegant though
they may sound, and absolutely the right direction) will be as stable
for some considerable time.
-Justin
