Re: reasons for modperl declines?

On 2024-08-08 22:51, Mithun Bhattacharya wrote:
> So I am a mod_perl user for about 25 years now - pretty much I started 
> with
> perl and mod_perl together :)
> 
> Looking at the conversation I can see it is diverging into two parts - 
> one
> what to do with mod_perl and in general concerns with Perl.
> 
> Yes we have alternatives to mod_perl and you should definitely consider
> Mojolicious if that suits your requirement but for that you need to
> understand what mod_perl is offering.
> 
> mod_perl is allowing you to leverage apache as a foundation to handle 
> HTTP
> requests while your code does whatever business needs you have to 
> fulfill.
> 
> To give an example - this is 1999 the internet has realized you could 
> hack
> open SQL Servers on the internet using scripts. Now I am managing a 
> website
> for a startup running a production server with 128MB RAM I think. Now
> imagine all the script kiddies hammering away at your webserver looking 
> for
> SQL Server when you have only apache and mysql :( For the first three 
> days
> our server was pretty much dead - it would maybe honor a request every 
> few
> minutes. To solve it I add a PerlTransHandler and drop all requests for 
> the
> nasty endpoints - guess what we are back online with no impact to the
> server any more.
> 
> Another example - we learnt you could write Apache configuration in 
> perl -
> it blew our mind. Rest assured most people dont know about this 
> capability
> so God forbid you are stuck trying to solve something in this you will 
> not
> find anything on Google. What we did was templatized the complete 
> Apache
> config. We have clean segregation of which Location and LocationMatch 
> urls
> need which library. We use a for loop to apply auth on everything and 
> our
> configs are very easy to understand for perl programmers and it is very
> compact.
> 
> Company decided everyone needed SSL - most teams needed to plan it out. 
> We
> just included mod_ssl get the certificates and updated our config and 
> we
> were done in three days. Need to add custom header on every request - 
> done
> in two lines.
> 
> We need to use the application in a variety of server configs - no 
> problem
> we compute the number of child processes to spawn at run time.
> 
> Have a low latency service which needs to respond fast - changed the
> logging to report the processing time as Aapche knows.

Thanks Mithun for sharing so many Application Scenarios to us.
They do sound great.

> 
> What we learnt you do mod_perl if you have a plan to leverage apache. 
> If
> you have a big fat application where receiving the request is a minor 
> part
> of the solution then we split it up and handle the request in mod_perl 
> and
> then hand over the hard work to a farm of servers. This way your 
> mod_perl
> instance scales based on the volume of requests and the workers scale 
> based
> on the amount of work to be done.

Ah yes, I am doing this on our side. we have a farm of mp servers, 
splitting the requests across all servers.

> 
> Now why is it not popular - primarily because it was so difficult to
> setup initially. Most people did not have access to control apache 
> config
> and they did not know what could be done. The community did not help
> encourage it either. I do not have root access on our servers -who 
> cares. I
> have my own relocatable apache, own relocatable perl running on a non
> standard port and I dont bother any super user for help.
> 

In now days configuration is not a hard job if you like to learn. 
everyone can get a VPS from the cloud provider with low cost. :)

-- 
regards,
Jeff Pang