RE: suggestions for perl as web development language [EXT]

There are cases where Plack though isn't the solution and where mod_perl written well is a far better (more stable) solution.

It is good when the backend servers are slow (simple not complex app); backend requests are relatively fast, and don't use much memory.

But the warning

(1) If you have large numbers of small apps on a domain (a couple we have have over 60 admin apps under a single domain) or a large single app code base - but where many of the larger requests are hardly used; the ability to choose which perl is cached in shared memory and which is loaded when required is much simpler;
(2) Large code bases can also lead to very slow start-up times;
(3) If there are possibilities of large/slow requests - apache's dynamic nature is better and handling these and then clearing memory - issues with each Plack process keeping large amounts of memory and difficulty in culling/restarting individual Plack children; then handling load efficiently across multiple machines as the front end proxies - have difficulty handling load balancing in this case;

Note I work on a number of projects where the data is relatively large (some including many billions of rows of (closely related) entries)


-----Original Message-----
From: Steven Lembark <[email protected]> 
Sent: 20 December 2020 15:31
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: suggestions for perl as web development language [EXT]

On Tue, 4 Aug 2020 19:59:01 -0500
Mithun Bhattacharya <[email protected]> wrote:

> The question is move off to what ? I don't see alternatives being 
> shared which blows an apache+mod_perl setup out of the water.

(Sorry for being late on this...)

There are a variety of servers using Plack which can handle heavy loads and are both better documented and easier to manage than Apache. You can see a list at:

    <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__plackperl.org_&d=DwICAg&c=D7ByGjS34AllFgecYw0iC6Zq7qlm8uclZFI0SqQnqBo&r=oH2yp0ge1ecj4oDX0XM7vQ&m=0pvlZHIoJPSsNhAVAVBL0NMNcYWvoQoOAVEPR_qHMJo&s=O1eJE9v7RhxcM7aaINIPmQv8R8CZSbIRwuxV2rLqHXA&e= >

One big advantage to Plack is *not* having to become a walking encyclopedia of Apache2 internals. Shoving structs around was the only way we knew in the 80's, mod_perl was just an extension of "pass a struct" and keep going. Plack provides an abstraction that at least I find simpler to program with and things like Dancer2 give you the opportunity to munge the incoming request in all sorts of ways to handle messy situations. Beyond that take a look at the servers listed on Plack's website.

--
Steven Lembark
Workhorse Computing
[email protected]
+1 888 359 3508


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