> 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.
Well, that is the primary reason for using Perl over C, and you really have to count maintenance and the relative likelihood of C-ish bugs like buffer overflows as part of it. Well-coded C should be faster than Perl, but Perl is fast enough for nearly any web-based application. If this guy saw CPU spikes, he probably had something else wrong, like running out of memory. You might find this article aboout C and Perl performance useful: http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2001/06/27/ctoperl.html - Perrin
