At 03:58 PM 12/14/2001, Jeff Yoak wrote: >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.
CPU usage is certainly one factor... but CPUs are cheap compared to development man-hours. Since you haven't provided any details on the application, this may not be relevant, but most of the web apps that we write (and I read about here) spend much of their time waiting for responses from other back-end servers - databases, NFS mounted file systems, or whatever. It's probably undeniable that a well written C application will run faster than almost anything in an interpreted language, but that may not make much of a difference to the total response time. -Simon Simon Rosenthal ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Web Systems Architect Northern Light Technology One Athenaeum Street. Suite 1700, Cambridge, MA 02142 Phone: (617)621-5296: URL: http://www.northernlight.com "Northern Light - Just what you've been searching for"
