At 09:15 PM 12/14/2001 +0100, Thomas Eibner wrote: >The key to mod_perl development is speed, there are numerous testimonials >from users implementing a lot of work in a very short time with mod_perl. >Ask the clients investor wheter he wants to pay for having everything you >did rewritten as an Apache module in C. That is very likely going to take >a lot of time.
Thank you for your reply. I realized in reading it that my tone leads one to the common image of a buzzword driven doody-head who wants this because of what he read in Byte. That's certainly common enough, and I've never had a problem dealing with such types. (Well... not an unsolvable problem... :-) This is something different. The investor is in a related business, and has developed substantially similar software for years. And it is really good. What's worse is that my normal, biggest argument isn't compelling in this case, that by the time this would be done in C, I'd be doing contract work on Mars. The investor claims to have evaluated Perl vs. C years ago, to have witnessed that every single hit on the webserver under mod_perl causes a CPU usage spike that isn't seen with C, and that under heavy load mod_perl completely falls apart where C doesn't. (This code is, of course, LONG gone so I can't evaluate it for whether the C was good and the Perl was screwy.) At any rate, because of this, he's spent years having good stuff written in C. Unbeknownst to either me or my client, both this software and its developer were available to us, so in this case it would have been faster, cheaper and honestly even better, by which I mean more fully-featured. So he's upset. Everyone acknowledges that given our particular circumstances, it would have been better to build upon what we already had, but because of his previous experience he feels that mod_perl wasn't even a responsible choice even within the limits of our lack of knowledge of his software and its availability. So I'm trying to show that mod_perl doesn't suck, and that it is, in fact, a reasonable choice. Though within these limits it is still reasonable to point out the development cycle, emotionally it is the least compelling form of argument, because the investor has a hard time removing from consideration that given our particular situation, there was a very fast solution in using his C-based routines. >Take a look at Joshua Chamas benchmarks (Although they're only hello >world style apps) it shows that mod_perl is pretty fast. I will look for this particularly. Thanks. Cheers, Jeff > -- Jeff Yoak 626-705-6996
