On Tuesday 01 December 2009 2:52:38 pm Paweł Prędki wrote:
> Hello,
> I have a website that uses a php engine for news generation and,
> basically, most of the other pages. It uses a MySQL database to store
> the majority of the page contents (i.e. news).
>
> However, I've written before that I've started using simple CGI scripts
> in Perl to make some activities automatic (i.e. statistics updates,
> standings updates - it's a sports-related website :) ).
>
> At first, I used the Storable module and kept all the data in flat files
> but it generally is not the best solution so I moved to DBI.
>
> Now, the thing is that the PHP scripts also connect to the database and,
> presumably, uphold the connection over the duration of the session so as
> not to disconnect and reconnect continually when the user browses the
> website.
>
> My question is - is it possible to do the same thing with those CGI
> scripts? At the moment, each script 'requires' a module where a function
> is defined which returns a database handle upon connecting to the
> database. This is not an efficient solution and I would like to change
> that. There is no mod_perl running on the server but maybe there is a
> way to keep the connection via some Apache mechanisms. I'm not
> experienced with the server operation that much so forgive me if what I
> wrote is hogwash ;)
> Cheers,
> Pawl
There is absolutely no reason to keep a connection to the database active
once the query has finished and the results are fetched and processed , doing
so only ties up system resources and memory. The default for Mysql in a
un- altered server install is 50 concurrent connections. A web site can very
easily surpass this if the connections are kept alive. The behavior of the
DBI module returning a handle that you interact with is the most efficient use
of resources . And I'm pretty sure if you research it you will find that PHP
does the same thing as PHP is modled after Perl on many levels. Once the
object is created it persist for the duration of the script or until it is
destroyed with a call to disconnect. Or you risk getting "unable to connect ,
too many connections" from your MySql server. and if you have not
programmed to handle the error , you will get silent failure with the
page just hanging up never completing a read or write.
good luck
Greg
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