[Pdx-pm] July Meeting

[Josh Heumann]

Two weeks from tonight:

Perlbal, by Brad Fitzpatrick

Brad Fitzpatrick is the founder and fearless leader of LiveJournal.com, an
Open Source project and company focused on blogging and social networking
with over 3,000,000 accounts, over half of which are in active use. His
specialties have come to include Perl, frightening MySQL replication
topologies, load balancing, distributed caching, scalability, and
high-availability. He dislikes buying unnecessary hardware and commercial
software. As such, he finds or creates ways to get more out of hardware,
the open source way.

Perlbal

Perlbal's a load-balancing reverse HTTP proxy, as well as a webserver, as
well as hybrid combo (useful for serving big files with complex
auth/mapping which Perl/PHP is better at). It also has web-based stats. It
uses epoll and sendfile to do things incredibly fast which Perl normally
sucks at. Everything works in a single thread using an event-based model
(hence epoll) and all truly synchronous operations (like the one-time stat
and open syscalls before a sendfile) are done in a cloned helper thread
which communicates the results back async over a pipe (Linux::AIO module).

Basically it all shows how you can do really fancy low-level stuff in Perl
and still be fast.