I was trying to test the CGI response time of a
Perl/CGI script under two conditions: as multiple
modules versus a single big script. First I installed
IndigoPerl (from indigostar.com) on my Windows machine
(which has an integrated apache server with mod_perl
enabled by default). Then I ran this script locally
against the local server:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
use Time::HiRes;
my $script = $ARGV[0];
my $totalTime = 0;
my $i; for ($i=0; $i < 20; $i++) {
my $before = Time::HiRes::gettimeofday();
if ( $script eq 'big' ) {
print "Running big: ";
if ( !defined( my $content =
LWP::Simple::get('http://localhost/cgi-bin/bigtool.cgi')))
{
print "failed get\n";
}
} else {
if ( !defined( my $content =
LWP::Simple::get('http://localhost/cgi-bin/webtool.cgi')))
{
print "failed get\n"; }
}
my $elapsed = Time::HiRes::gettimeofday() -
$before;
print "did $i in $elapsed seconds.\n";
$totalTime = $totalTime + $elapsed;
}
$totalTime = $totalTime / 20;
print "Average response time for 20 requests was:
$totalTime seconds.\n";
######## end of script #########
After I set up my app (webtool.cgi) and created the
single script version (bigtool.cgi), I ran this script
on my machine and it showed that the single file was
about 10-15% faster than the multiple modules.
My first question is, is the above script a valid test
of CGI response time? So, for example, should the
results reflect any improvements with mod_perl
enabled? Because what I found is that the response
time differed
less than 5% between mod_perl-enabled and mod_perl
disabled configurations.
The CGI application I'm testing this on is about 4,100
lines of Perl, and 114k bytes.
I emailed support@indigostar, but it's been over two
days and no reply yet. I figure I'd just throw this
out
there for feedback. From other postings, it seems like
Windows mod_perl works great, and I should see a
significant speed-up.
btw, I'm running Windows 98 SE on a 500 MHz machine.
Here's another test I did: I ran my test script
remotely against my local IndigoPerl server
from my remote unix account on sourceforge (because
I thought maybe an interaction between the test
script and the server running on the same machine).
Basically, it shows the same results: enabling
mod_perl only improves performance about 0-5%. I
even tried this timing test against the simple
one-line
'hellocgi.pl' script that came with IndigoPerl, and
it's response is also similar with or without mod_perl
(0.47 sec versus 0.54 seconds).
Here's the thing I discoved in doing this though: when
mod_perl is enabled, the disk indicator on my machine
does not blink on when running the remote test script;
with mod_perl disabled, the light blinks! So this
would indicate that mod_perl is getting enabled
and is 'working', not going to disk for requests...
unfortunately, it doesn't seem to improve the overall
response time much.
Comments? I'm certainly hoping that either this isn't
a valid test, or that IndigoPerl is just broken...
-alan
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