grant stevens wrote: > I think all I'm asking about is a performance comparison for a site > comprised of 95% static content between Apache SSI and a mod_perl > db/template system.
Well, mod_include (SSI) is the best choice if it meets your needs. A modern OS will cache your include files in RAM and the whole thing will be very fast. Yes, some perl templating systems cache content in memory and might manage to squeeze out some pages slightly faster, but you will pay for that with hugely increased memory consumption which reduces the number of requests you can handle in parallel. In the end, throughput from a server running mod_include will probably be significantly higher. Apache::SSI is about the same speed as mod_include (on apache 1.x) but uses much more memory. If you are just serving static files, stick with mod_include. The real reason people use templating systems beyond SSI is that they require more power and flexibility. At the point where you start needing to do things with dynamic content, you should probably kiss SSI goodbye. By the way, SSI (or something very close to it) is pretty much the only way to go if you have thousands of unique static files. A system like Mason or Template Toolkit that caches the files in memory would quickly blow up in that situation, and you would end up needing to work around it by keeping most of the pages on disk and loading them at request time, just like SSI. - Perrin
