Hi, gang. I'm working on my first serious mod_perl app, and have a few
questions regarding efficiency -- basically looking for traps I may not
have internalized after reading the mod_perl_traps page and so forth.
I'm developing a site that will use MySQL on the backend to store some
info related to goofy timewasting projects (e.g., name, url, contributor,
date last updated, description, etc.) The idea is that there really needs
to be a site where I can list all my goofy timewasting projects, and I
want other people to submit their stuff, too. Sort of a freshmeat for the
random non-commercial stuff that abounds on the 'Net, but which seems to
be neglected in this weblog age, or doesn't get much notice unless it's an
Open Source [tm] project with millions of contributors. :)
Anyway. I have been designing the templates for each class of page on the
site (main project list, individual project detail, admin forms, and so
forth). I want to populate each template with data from the db. I don't
particularly want to use EmbPerl; I'd rather read the templates at init
time and parse in the db data when the page is to be returned. Are there
any traps I should be aware of? I only have four or five relatively small
templates, so memory consumption shouldn't be a big deal. From what I
understand from reading the Guide, these vars will likely be shared,
anyway, right, if I make the vars global and populate them at startup?
I figure I'll put the actual perl modules in lib/perl/, and put the
templates I'm going to use in directories under docroot that correspond
to the handler I've defined, just for sanity's sake. So,
<Location /hello>
SetHandler perl-script
PerlHandler Apache::Hello
</Location>
would use templates found in $docroot/hello, and so on. But the actual
templates would be loaded at httpd init time, and kept around, then
I'll perform substitutions on them based on user input or database info.
I know about using /o to compile a regex. The embedded tokens in the
templates won't change, so this will probably work fine, right?
(e.g.:
<!--( $variable )-->
can be replaced by the variable's value on the fly, without hitting
the disk to open the template file:
my $variable = "something I got from a form or db";
my @lines = split($GLOBAL_VAR_CONTAINING_TEMPLATE_GUTS);
while(@lines) {
s/<!--( $variable )-->/$variable/o;
print;
}
I know to use persistent db connections and pre-load DBI. I know to
tweak Max* to maximize performance. I'm just wondering if there's any
other obvious traps that come to mind. Thanks in advance.
Steve
