[boulder.pm] meeting?

[Walter Pienciak]

On Tue, 3 Sep 2002, Rob Nagler wrote:

> Walter Pienciak writes:
> > What is unreliable about the CGI mechanism?
>
> mod_perl and our infrastructure caches all files.

You speak of bOP when you say 'our infrastructure'?

> If you are installing a new release, you just install it and
> restart the server.  No worries about "woops, file disappeared
> in new release, but still serving old files".

I'm not following.  It seems clear you have a good example in mind,
but whatever it is, I've never run across the problem, I think.

> Systems are more if all the code is loaded in memory once.  When you
> have constant reloads, you can have transient errors for a variety of
> reasons, e.g. not enough memory or processes.  It is easier to design
> for peak load and be sure the system operates well under peak load.
>
> If you aren't building complex apps (> 50 pages) or high transaction
> rates (> 1/sec), it probably doesn't matter.  CGI is fine as is
> anything else.

I guess I'm just feeling argumentative (in a good-natured way) today,
but doesn't mod_perl bring its own set of headaches to the table
-- memory leaks for example -- that for simpler solutions point back
to CGI as preferable?  There's no doubt that for high-performance
systems mod_perl is clearly preferable -- in-memory and ready to go,
persistent database connections, etc. -- but my preference for low-end
low-usage programs is still CGI.  (I prefer a paper calendar to a
PDA, too, so . . .)

FWIW (for all those following along), all my servers are mod_perl enabled
and I'm a huge fan of mod_perl handlers -- they are really easy to
write and work with.  And you can do things using the API that you just
can't do in CGI.  I just prefer CGI for the simple stuff.  Disk I/O and
CPUs nowadays make the startup cost of infrequently requested apps
insignificant to the user experience when compared with network
latency (in my opinion, and the database-backend issue something separate
entirely).

Ah, gotta go.  My wife just got home, and it's time to go out to
dinner (20th anniversary).  Woohoo!

Walter the CGI Luddite