-- Jeff Yoak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on 12/14/01 12:58:51 -0800
> 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.
Constructing the $r object in perl-space is an overhead
that mod_perl causes. This overhead has been managed more
effectively in recent versions of perl/mod_perl. A study
done "a few years ago" probably involved machines with
significantly less core and CPU horsepower than the average
kiddie-games PC does today. Net result is that any overhead
caused by mod_perl in the previous study may well have been
either mitigated with better code or obviated by faster
hardware [how's that for a sentence?].
Net result is that the objection is probably based on once-
valid but now out of date analysis.
--
Steven Lembark 2930 W. Palmer
Workhorse Computing Chicago, IL 60647
+1 800 762 1582
