Our mod_perl success story.
As consultants we were hired to repair, revamp and rebuild a online classifieds site in which a lot of cost and effort was placed in promoting the site and generating traffic but the site itself was based on a 3rd party product that simply could not handle the half million hits a day the site was getting. Without a lot of effort the decision was made to build a custom solution from the ground up using Perl and Apache under Linux. After completing the project and having some difficult issues with the current ISP we moved the entire site to an ISP that we have had a long term relationship with and who provides us with everything one would need to properly maintain such a project. Little did we know that the second we moved to our new ISP it was like opening up the flood gates (long story relating to other ISP), overnight this CGI driven site went from a half million hits a day to a million and with it came a number of problems, a lot of which were unfixable without adding more hardware - there was simply far too much traffic coming through during the peak times of the day. Having spent a week doing everything we could, optimizing everything possible it was clear that at best, we may be able to gain enough to just keep our heads above water. Reluctantly we knew we had no choice but to give mod_perl a try, we really didn't think it was going to make that much of a difference but every little bit counted at this point. We knew that it was going to be very difficult to setup apache and especially convert our code over - I mean after all I've heard as many stories of nightmare conversions as success stories. After about the first week of pouring through the documentation and experimenting on our development server, I realized HOW WRONG I WAS.. Once we understood what was expected, conversion of the current code was less painful and a lot more interesting to do then some of the phone calls or meetings that led up to getting the contract for the project itself J. Once everything was done we could see instantly the improvement on our dev server, what we didn't know nor what we were prepared for was what would happen once this was running in production, I mean sure it was fast when there is only 2 of us on the machine, so was the old site. What we saw after going live was one of those moments when you are just blown away, where you are sitting there saying "I see it but I just don't believe it". At our best estimate we gained more then a 300% performance increase, during peak hours we were seeing load times of 20 - 30, processing going defunct etc. etc. prior to mod_perl. Since the day we went live we haven't seen the machines even sweat, even the DB machine was impacted by the change in a positive way. We are currently up over 2 million hits a day, the 1 million hits gained since going live with mod_perl has resulted in practically nothing (everything is still saying "Give me More!!!") We'd like to think it was easy moving to mod_perl because we are such awesome coders, but of course the truth is it's due to the awesome documentation at http://perl.apache.org, the fantastic support of mod_perl in all those perl modules we have all come to depend on, the invaluable mailing lists and mailing list archives, and what I personally think is the coolest thing of all, Stas Bekman who never left me or anyone else I've seen on the mailing list hanging for any answer. We have just completed a re-design of the site and have been up and running under Apache 2 and mod_perl 2 for about 6 months now with as few problems as anyone could ever hope to have. Mod_perl is clearly the solution for high traffic sites, however because of our experience with mod_perl we have since done everything in it, from the simplest of form mailers to complex sites because in my eyes there is no reason not to do things the best possible way the first time around! Thanks to Everyone on the Mod_perl Team Chris Faust Developer of http://www.isoldmyhouse.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stas Bekman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2003 1:50 AM Subject: is anybody using mp2 in production? > I've heard that some people are already using mod_perl 2.0 in production. It'd > be interesting to hear mp2 both success and failure stories. > > p.s. mod_perl 1.99_09, which includes new features and lots of bug fixes, > should be released as soon as the current cvs is stabilized. So testing the > current cvs and reporting any problems (especially build/test ones) would be > helpful to make the new release better. About the same time Apache::Test > should be released on CPAN. > > __________________________________________________________________ > Stas Bekman JAm_pH ------> Just Another mod_perl Hacker > http://stason.org/ mod_perl Guide ---> http://perl.apache.org > mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://use.perl.org http://apacheweek.com > http://modperlbook.org http://apache.org http://ticketmaster.com >
