Path: news.cs.au.dk!not-for-mail
From: "Sascha Kimmel" <kimmel@tricos.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.beta
Subject: RE: BETA for CGI
Date: 21 Jun 2000 08:30:46 -0000
Organization: University of Aarhus, Department of Computer Science (DAIMI)
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Georg Bauhaus [mailto:sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de]
> Sent: Monday, June 19, 2000 7:50 PM
> To: usergroup@mjolner.dk
> Subject: Re: BETA for CGI
>
>
> Erik Corry (corry@mjolner.dk) wrote:
> : Sascha Kimmel <tricos@bravenewweb.net> wrote:
> : > Lars Balker Rasmussen <lbr@mjolner.dk> said:
>
> : 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.
>
> : 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.
>
> : > 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.
>
> >From experience in a relatively high load setting[+],
> I would like to submit that running Perl-CGI Scripts on our
> servers with high load (>50 apache instances, grouped using
> different configurations, order of a million hits per month) had
> to be dropped, not enough performance because of
> startup/compile/interpret. (Lots of dynamically created content,

Did you ever think about upgrading/clustering your web servers?
You can also dynamically redirect any incoming connection via DNS to the
corresponding server, e.g. redirect from www.* to www5.* and so on.


> DB-supplied). Then mod_perl was compiled in, blowing up the
> executables (it looked like Perl cannot be shared across instances
> of apache).
>
> Perl programming then becomes a trickery: Avoid using any global
> variables, consider *every* warning Perl can give you, in essence
> stop using Perl as a _scripting_ language.

Depends on WHAT you're programming!


> Learn a lot about unix processes and forking, all this
> in connection with the built in perls, mod_perl-required additional
> configuration, and the modules' data handling.
> Touching Perl library modules that were used in the scripts would
> not be noted in the running servers, thus signal -HUP or -USR1,
> reload.
>
> : >> [The implementation of a PERL::CGI-like]
> : >> module for BETA is left as an exercise to the interested reader.
>
> For quite some CGI scripts CGI.pm turns out to be overkill.

I NEVER use cgi.pm


> While easy to use, much of it can be avoided at the cost of
> a few hours/minutes of addtional programming. Afaics, CGI.pm is
> a convenience module, not something to be used where performance
> counts[*]. Thus, if I may say so, this might reasonably remain
> a recurring exercise :-).
>
> As for REs, we have found (once again, presumably) that they form
> only small part (the "data laundry" stage) of the algorithmic
> work in a script that does something.

Again depends on WHAT you're programming and WHAT your website is all about!


> Thus, it seems like in this kind of setting, the myths
> have to be boiled down somewhat in order to arrive at
> figures that

.....? Where's the end of the sentence?


> With apologies for mentioning still another language than BETA
> for a RE source, there is a free implementation of SPITBOL
> patterns in the GNU Ada 95 compiler libraries. (no GPL need).
>
> How do you intend to have programmers build REs in a BETA
> source program? Using strings of "+\w\G\d*(?i:#)"-Syntax?
> Really? :-)

Yes, of course!
It's quite intuitive to understand such patterns IF you understand REGEX!


> I'd prefer a mix with sth like
> re.alpha->re.digits->re.compile->matcher;
> where alpha and digits output corresponding RE-patterns
>
> (Sorry if I messed the syntax.)

I prefer easiest implementation which does not always have to be very strict
regarding the syntax!

Regards,
Sascha Kimmel