On Thu, 2004-01-08 at 20:22, Simon Clewer wrote: > Huge memory usage ... each ithread uses about 10M of ram ( image of Apache, > image of mod perl and image of our deep-link robot ), and as we use 5 > ithreads plus the original thread that means that each Apache is using 60 M > and because we trade on being the best and the fastest at what we do we need > to keep plenty of Apaches ready and waiting ( about 20 ) - so we're using > heaps of memory.
My question would be, why are you using Perl threads for this? The talk about the 5.8 threads sounds pretty bad, both for memory and performance. I can't imagine ithreads were a whole lot better on either front. I think you'd be better off forking. > Does anybody know how we can reduce the amount of memory we use ? If I were designing a system to do what you're doing, I would make it asynchronous. Do the form interaction with mod_perl, then let another program do the data collection without typing up an apache process, and let your user wait on a "working..." page until it's done. You can do this by forking, or by pushing a request onto a queue (like a database table or dbm file) that another process monitors. The techniques for forking from mod_perl are described here: http://perl.apache.org/docs/1.0/guide/performance.html#Forking_and_Executing_Subprocesses_from_mod_perl An example of a "working..." page is given in this column by Randal: http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/WebTechniques/col20.html - Perrin -- Reporting bugs: http://perl.apache.org/bugs/ Mail list info: http://perl.apache.org/maillist/modperl.html
