Addendum: Re: [VPM] Question (about fast Perl interpreters)

[Darren Duncan]

Following Peter's announcement of the 2003 Perl Advent Calendar, I think that the item on the 4th day will provide another answer to Abez' question.

http://perladvent.org/2003/4th/

It is something called 'PPerl'.  This is not specific to web servers at all.  It's feature is that it creates and manages a set of Perl processes in memory, which remember compiled Perl code.

Just replacing your:

#!/usr/bin/perl 

With:

#!/usr/bin/pperl

Results in that the scripts which you run a lot don't have the overhead of starting the Perl interpreter or compiling the scripts.  This is significant particularly when those tasks take a good fraction of your execution time.

The caveats, I would imagine, like with mod_perl, is that you will have extra work to do if you keep changing your scripts.  I suspect that changes on the disk files may not be noticed unless you tell pperl to restart the process pool.  Though I could be wrong.  In mod_perl's case, this means restarting Apache for it to notice your code changes.

-- Darren Duncan