I am at a cross roads with a rather large project to put a course of lessons
on the web where extracts from four text books are compiled to create a
"Lesson of the Day" which is determined by the ordinal day of the
astronomical year which begins on April 13.
Now Metacard was a "God send" in getting this job done...but now I am at a
cross roads on the final leg with two options:
1) Page generation locally, mc.cgi will simply pull a page:
I can run a script "at home" which loads html page header, body and footer
templates, then extracts the lessons 1-365 from raws text source files and
generate 365 lessons totally about 7 megs of data and then FTP this to the
site and create a CGI in Metacard that simply calculates the integer for the
day of the year and serves up the corresponding file from a directory
OR
2) Have MC Generate the pages on the server
I can move the source text and templates to the web server and convert my
local metacard button script to a .mt script and then let the web server
build the page each time someone hits on it.
The latter has lots of administrative advantages even though #1 is a
relatively simply operation should changes be required...
But the second option forces the web server to
i) load three variables with small templates of html chunks
ii) load four variables with a total of about 2.5, meg of data from the
books, parse out the lessons for the day, make the necessary
insertions/concatenations into the templates and serve up the page.
Now, the latter obviously puts a heavier burden on the web server CPU. The
question which is beyond me is...for Apache running on a Sun Sparc Solaris,
is option 2 a trivial task? or given that at any point in time, 5-10 people
could be hitting on the link that invokes the CGI...would using option two
constitute an undue burden on the CPU of the web server? I know from running
it at home that the script to read in the data and create a single lesson is
almost instantaneous on a G4. Any thoughts from the experiences ones?
this decision not only affects this project, but the whole direction for
page deployment to the web in the future.
thanks
Hinduism Today
Sivakatirswami
Editor's Assistant/Production Manager
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