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

Running individual functions in independent threads can't be a solution for
performance optimization - at least I have never heard such a thing, maybe
others can pitch in.

On Sun, Dec 20, 2020 at 4:15 PM John Dunlap <[email protected]> wrote:

> I have no doubt that our application can be optimized. We do so whenever
> we encounter poor performance and we will continue to do so. The point is
> that Perl didn't do a lot to help us in this regard. Languages like elixir
> use immutable data structures and will automatically run individual
> function calls in separate threads. Perl, by contrast, will only have a
> single thread per request.
>
> On Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 3:33 PM Mithun Bhattacharya <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> You would have to define poor system performance - are you doing anything
>> cpu intensive at all ? Maybe your RAM is being the bottleneck ?
>>
>> On Sun, Dec 20, 2020 at 2:28 PM John Dunlap <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> It's extremely inefficient by comparison. We host our application on
>>> beefy servers with 32 cores and 64G of ram and I commonly see poor system
>>> performance with less than 25% cpu utilization.
>>>
>>> On Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 2:22 PM Mithun Bhattacharya <[email protected]>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Agreed prefork is recommended but what is the problem with that ?
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, Dec 20, 2020 at 12:47 PM John Dunlap <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Our app segfaults at random of we use anything other than prefork.
>>>>>
>>>>> On Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 1:32 PM Mithun Bhattacharya <[email protected]>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> I am confused - you like threads so Perl is bad ? I am very happy
>>>>>> forking away and yes I work a lot with non thread safe DBI connections
>>>>>> without any issues.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Sun, Dec 20, 2020 at 11:53 AM John Dunlap <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> In my opinion, no one should build new projects in Perl. The world
>>>>>>> is increasingly trending towards parallelism and higher numbers of cpu
>>>>>>> cores and Perl is poorly positioned to leverage these advancements. Many of
>>>>>>> Perl's dependencies are not thread safe and mod_perl forces you to use
>>>>>>> mpm_prefork. My organization has started moving away from Perl to Elixir
>>>>>>> for these reasons.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On Tue, Aug 4, 2020, 3:37 AM James Smith <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Perl is a great solution for web development.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Others will disagree but the best way I still believe is using
>>>>>>>> mod_perl - but only if you use it's full power - and you probably need a
>>>>>>>> special sort of mind set to use - but that can be said for any language.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> From experience - it may be fractionally slower than small
>>>>>>>> "standalone" apps that dancer etc are good at, but it is (a) much, much
>>>>>>>> more stable {dancer etc does not cope well with either large requests or
>>>>>>>> lots of small requests}, and (b) if you have a large code base and/or a
>>>>>>>> large number of services then it generally uses much less compute power
>>>>>>>> than the others {can easily handle multiple services on a single apache
>>>>>>>> instance}
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Where it really gains is the hooks into the apache process - being
>>>>>>>> able to add functionality easily at any stage in the request process, from
>>>>>>>> path translation, AAA stages, pre-processing, to post-processing and
>>>>>>>> logging, and also to interact with other languages at any stage - e.g. can
>>>>>>>> handle pre-processing & post-processing around a script written in another
>>>>>>>> language (e.g. PHP, Java) or produced by another webserver integrated by
>>>>>>>> mod_proxy.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> It isn't really a framework though like dancer or mojolicious and
>>>>>>>> thus has its own advantages and disadvantages.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> You would to some extent have to roll your own code to produce the
>>>>>>>> pages themselves although there are libraries out there to do lots of it.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> We have an in house library whose embryonic stages were written
>>>>>>>> over 20 years ago - and has now been stable for around 12-13 years and
>>>>>>>> works strong...
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> James
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>>>>> From: Wesley Peng <[email protected]>
>>>>>>>> Sent: 04 August 2020 06:43
>>>>>>>> To: [email protected]
>>>>>>>> Subject: suggestions for perl as web development language [EXT]
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> greetings,
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> My team use all of perl, ruby, python for scripting stuff.
>>>>>>>> perl is stronger for system admin tasks, and data analysis etc.
>>>>>>>> But for web development, it seems to be not as popular as others.
>>>>>>>> It has less selective frameworks, and even we can't get the right
>>>>>>>> people to do the webdev job with perl.
>>>>>>>> Do you think in today we will give up perl/modperl as web
>>>>>>>> development language, and choose the alternatives instead?
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Thanks & Regards
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>>>  The Wellcome Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research
>>>>>>>>  Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a
>>>>>>>>  company registered in England with number 2742969, whose
>>>>>>>> registered
>>>>>>>>  office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>