Path: news.cs.au.dk!not-for-mail
From: "Sascha Kimmel" <kimmel@tricos.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.beta
Subject: RE: BETA for CGI
Date: 19 Jun 2000 17:39:06 -0000
Organization: University of Aarhus, Department of Computer Science (DAIMI)
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Erik Corry [mailto:corry@mjolner.dk]
> Sent: Monday, June 19, 2000 4:43 PM
> To: usergroup@mjolner.dk
> Subject: BETA for CGI
>
>
> Sascha Kimmel <tricos@bravenewweb.net> wrote:
> > Lars Balker Rasmussen <lbr@mjolner.dk> said:
>
> >> As for Sascha's comment:
> >>> The only possibility to use BETA for CGI programming is to use BETA as
> >>> a language for programming a server!
> >>
> >> This is not true.
>
> > Technically it is possible of course, but I don't think that
> this is a good
> > approach, loading an executable file of some megs in size will
> > 1) take some time
> > 2) these megs will use up RAM
> > 3) make it impossible to do this on a high-load server, because
> you need much
> > much RAM for this (imagine a high-load-website with 50 calls to
> your CGI app
> > (in BETA) per second - if your file has a size of 1MB this
> means starting 50
> > of these files as fast as possible, so that the clients don't
> have to wait
> > and "wasting" your RAM with 50MB of code.
>
> Most of this should be shared between the instances, so the RAM use
> would be much smaller.  Also if it is called frequently, it would be
> cached, so it doesn't have to be read in from disk every time.

What type of chaching mechanism do you mean?


> With a perl CGI the perl interpreter would be shared in the same
> way, but every time you start the perl script the interpreter has
> to compile the script to its own internal format.

Yes, of course - but the Perl interpreter is very small!


> The performance tradeoff depends on how large your perl program is,
> how many different CGI scripts you have, whether perlmod is an
> option and how heavily you use regular expressions, which are
> heavily optimised in perl.

Perl="Practical Extraction and Report Language" :)


> > I guess the only possibility for a high- or moderate-load site
> is to use a
> > language that is embedded in the server (mod_perl or PHP as module e.g.)
>
> This is probably true.

mod_beta ? :)


> >> [The implementation of a PERL::CGI-like]
> >> module for BETA is left as an exercise to the interested reader.
>
> > .. which is not easy because only Mjolner has the sourcecode
> for the BETA
> > runtime system ...
>
> I don't think you need to change the runtime system for this sort
> of thing.  You have the source for almost all the libraries in the
> BETA system, only the compiler and the runtime system itself is
> missing.

And what about a BETA servlets? :)

regards,
Sascha Kimmel