Re: How do you use mod_perl for your web application?

On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 3:00 PM, Phil Van <[email protected]> wrote:
> Interesting.... those are mod_fcgid + CGI, compared to plain Apache +
> mod_perl + libapeq ?

There are a number of modules like CGI and libapreq that run in
multiple environments.  My benchmark was a Catalyst app that just
returned about 30K of HTML.

> I think all those application servers end up at roughly the same speed.

Yes, that's what I've seen.

> In
> my cases, mod_fcgid has fewer memory footprint, which is typically around
> 15-20M per application loaded with common modules like DBI, SHA1 and JSON.
> Eventually, one may serve more fcgid applications on the same machine.

Are you comparing that to mod_perl with a proxy server in front of it?
 That is the equivalent architecture.  If you remove the proxy,
mod_perl becomes faster but the scalability suffers.  I wouldn't
recommend anyone run mod_perl without a frontend proxy of some kind.

> This is true. The earlier mod_fastcgi is commercial licensed; and the
> support to AAA is almost broken. But the new fcgid, originally designed by
> xiaolan's friend (as in the previous post) is very active in development. As
> far as I know, it would be one of the standard modules in the coming httpd
> 2.4.

Better FastCGI support for Apache would be great.

> I am also trying to promote the new mod_fcgid here :-)

I think the main competition among FastCGI users is pure-perl daemons
as FastCGI backends.  I had good success in my tests with one of
those.

> This is a bad idea --- how about to serve a static mp3 in member area? We
> lose the advantages to serve the file as NOT MODIFIED, or system's efficient
> sendfile call.

You actually can access efficient file serving through the mod_perl
API, but I agree, auth in the app framework is often a bad solution.
My favorite solution so far has been to use things like mod_auth_tkt
which let you write a complex auth system in your favorite language
and then check credentials from an efficient C module that can guard a
static file directory.

- Perrin