Re: Help wanted with locations / configuration
On Tue, 2003-09-09 at 05:00, Steve Hay wrote: As in a PerlTransHandler, yes? Yup. Is there a performance penalty with this? You're using Perl code to inspect the URI, and then handing control back to the Apache core if it is a static file. I wanted to avoid requests for static files wasting time by going to a Perl handler only to be returned to the Apache core to serve the file, hence my LocationMatch override that catches requests for static files. Static File: Devel::Timer Report -- Total time: 0.0006 secs Interval TimePercent -- 00 - 01 0.0003 48.49% INIT - Entering translation handler 01 - 02 0.0002 36.91% Entering translation handler - Checking to see if we are asking for a static file 02 - 03 0.0001 14.60% Checking to see if we are asking for a static file - This is a request for a static file, telling apache where it is Request we want to pass on to our handler: Devel::Timer Report -- Total time: 0.0005 secs Interval TimePercent -- 01 - 02 0.0002 40.90% Entering translation handler - Checking to see if we are asking for a static file 00 - 01 0.0001 31.48% INIT - Entering translation handler 02 - 03 0.0001 27.62% Checking to see if we are asking for a static file - This is not a request for a static file, returning DENIED We decided to do it this way because we are also doing some other things in the translation handler that I didn't pass along in the snippet. Since we were already putting a translation handler in place to do our trickery there, it seemed to make the most sense to us to add the code to handle static requests there. By no means am I suggesting that this is the best way, but we're pretty happy with it. Marc Slagle
Re: Help wanted with locations / configuration
On Mon, 2003-09-08 at 11:51, Steve Hay wrote:
It also needs to have access to various static resources (images,
stylesheets, JavaScript libraries etc.).
Thus, I want to have something like this:
/myproject [mp1]
/myproject/component1 [mp1]
/myproject/component2 [mp1]
...
/myproject/images [static]
/myproject/javascript [static]
/myproject/stylesheets [static]
You might want to look at having a translation handler.
We're doing something similar to this, where images and javascripts live
under the same directory structure as the handler is managing. Instead
of trying to configure this via that httpd.conf file, we chose to have a
translation handler look at the incoming uri and determine whether the
request is for a static file or for the code.
Inside of our transhandler we're doing this:
sub handler
{
my $r=shift;
my $uri=$r-uri;
my $Tmplpath=/our/static/files/rootdir/;
if (($uri !~ /jpg$/) ($uri !~ /css$/) ($uri !~ /js$/))
{
$r-notes('host' = $Host);
$r-notes('olduri' = $uri);
$r-uri(/);
return DECLINED;
}
else
{
my $File=$Tmplpath . $uri;
$r-filename($File);
return OK;
}
}
If a request is made for anything ending in .jpg, .js or .css, we tell
apache where to find the file by appending the uri (/images/the.jpg for
example) to a path. The handler then returns OK, which tells apache not
to try to figure out where the file lives on its own, and returns the
file to the browser.
Any other request is passed to the handler, along with a field in
notes() that shows what we were asking for in the first place. Our
request handler uses this to dispatch the request to the correct object
needed to fulfill the request. (Our handler is configured at /, so we
override the uri passed from the browser to /).
Any other types you want can be added to this, I just threw the ones
that seemed relevant to you. I hope this helps.
Marc Slagle
Whapps LLC
RE: templating system opinions (axkit?)
What you have created for your own use is almost exactly what HTML::Template does. We have used it for a year without any major problems between us and the HTML designer. Its fast and supports loops and if statements. Its probably worth your while to check it out. As far as XSLT goes, we're moving to it now (XML::LibXSLT) and its making our life much easier. Our designer doesnt mind learning it, esp. after showing him what it can do. Marc Slagle Whapps, LLC. On Wed, 2003-07-23 at 10:27, Hauck, William B. wrote: Hi, I've been considering using a template system for an app that I'm working, but decided against it as the designers who would be putting the actual pages together (look n feel) use Adobe GoLive which does 'bad things' to non-html stuff (at least in my experience). What i've done is just use completely external html files with html-compliant comments indicating the data field. (example !-- APPNAME_USER_FIRST_NAME --). My application just reads in the html on startup and does a series of substition statements over the file as necessary to replace the comments with the actual data. Thus, each type of page has one base html (or html file pieces) that are merged with each other and data as necessary allowing all logic to be kept in the program.
Reading XML input from flash
Has anyone had any luck reading in the XML sent by the flash XML.sendandload function? I've looked on Macromedias site, and all over the web, but cant seem to get it to work. I know that the flash code is supposed to be POSTing the data. Ourflash app connects to the server and seems to be trying to send the data, but I cant capture it. If there's any sites or code snippets anyone can provide it would help out a lot. Thanks, Marc Slagle The Fulkert Consulting Group, Inc. 559 Liberty Hill 2W Cincinnati, OH 45210
Re: How do I force a 'Save Window?'
This works for me:
I'm using pdf stuff here, but you can set the
content type to whatever you want.
$r-content_type('application/pdf');$r-header_out("Content-Disposition"
= "attachment;
filename=order.pdf");$r-send_http_header();
Marc Slagle
- Original Message -
From: "Dennis Daupert" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2002 10:10
AM
Subject: Re: How do I force a 'Save
Window?'
Thanks all for the great suggestions. This group is
wonderfully helpful. I tried the quick route, setting MIME type to
"application/octet-stream," and that works fine for xl spreadsheets, but
I still get the same behavior as before with MS Project files (browser
IE 5.00.3105.0106, which is one of the IE versions we have to support).
I will need a bit more time to try some of the other more involved ideas
, so that won't be for a few more days. /dennis
---
Office phone: 817-762-8304
---
"Great leaders never tell people how to do their jobs.
Great leaders tell people what to do and establish a
framework within which it must
be done. Then
they let people on the front lines,
who know best, figure out how to get it done."
~ General H.
Norman Schwarzkopf
Possible module
I have written a module for one of our clients, and want to know if I should make it available on CPAN. My hope is that others might find it useful. The client had a system where he wanted all incoming requests for a site to have the exact same pages if you asked for anything except index.html. The index.html pages for each site were different, and were generated by him with names like index001.html for domain1.com, index002.html for domain2.com, etc. However, he had so many configured domains that his httpd.conf files were getting huge, and his httpd processes were getting bigger and bigger (this may not be a problem with apache 2, I wouldn't know.) We replaced the default translation handler with a perl one that grabbed the domain and matched it against a tied DB file if index.html was asked for (or just /). If the index wasn't asked for, then we just told apache where the directory was to get the files from. After switching to this system, the httpd processes shrank to 2-3 MB, and the number of sites configured to use this system was something like 100,000 individual domains or so, each sharing every single file except the index files. The regular httpd.conf only handled about 2000 before memory sizes became too big. The system also has handled 1.5 million hits in a day. The module addsa directive to the httpd.conf file: PerlIndexConfig, whichsets the directory the common files are located and the DB file to use for determining the index file locations. All I want to know is: Does anybody think this kind of module is useful enough to be made public? Any feedback would be great. Thanks. Marc Slagle
Re: Dynamically Changing the Document Root
The 'staged' version of their site is stored in a different directory,
and if i could just changed the document_root dynamically, most(?) of
our issues would be over.
Is there a way to do this? The documentation does not have any reference
to be able to change the document root (just get it via
$r-document_root).
You might want to use a translation handler (Chapter 7 of the Eagle book.)
We did something similar to this, where if a browser asks for an index page
it forces apache to use a db file to get its filename/path. You could check
the incoming path for the Preview mode and set $r-filename.
Something like:
my $uri=$r-parsed_uri;
my $Path=$uri-path;
if ($Path =~ /Preview/)
{
$r-filename($Path_to_file_on_filesystem);
return OK;
}
return DECLINED;
The above might not exactly do it, but its just a rough example. The return
OK will make apache skip its own URL to file translation stuff, where return
DECLINED should let apache continue as normal (reading httpd.conf for
finding paths, etc.)
Marc Slagle
Re: Throttling, once again
When this happened to our clients servers we ended up trying some of the mod_perl based solutions. We tried some of the modules that used shared memory, but the traffic on our site quickly filled our shared memory and made the module unuseable. After that we tried blocking the agents altogether, and there is example code in the Eagle book (Apache::BlockAgent) that worked pretty well. You might be able to place some of that code in your CGI, denying the search engines agents/IPs from accessing it, while allowing real users in. That way the search engines can still get static pages. We never tried mod_throttle, it might be the best solution. Also, one thing to keep in mind is that some search engines will come from multiple IP addresses/user-agents at once, making them more difficult to stop. Hi, Wasn't there just a thread on throttling a few weeks ago? I had a machine hit hard yesterday with a spider that ignored robots.txt. Load average was over 90 on a dual CPU Enterprise 3500 running Solaris 2.6. It's a mod_perl server, but has a few CGI scripts that it handles, and the spider was hitting one of the CGI scripts over and over. They were valid requests, but coming in faster than they were going out. Under normal usage the CGI scripts are only accessed a few times a day, so it's not much of a problem have them served by mod_perl. And under normal peak loads RAM is not a problem. The machine also has bandwidth limitation (packet shaper is used to share the bandwidth). That combined with the spider didn't help things. Luckily there's 4GB so even at a load average of 90 it wasn't really swapping much. (Well not when I caught it, anyway). This spider was using the same IP for all requests. Anyway, I remember Randal's Stonehenge::Throttle discussed not too long ago. That seems to address this kind of problem. Is there anything else to look into? Since the front-end is mod_perl, it mean I can use mod_perl throttling solution, too, which is cool. I realize there's some fundamental hardware issues to solve, but if I can just keep the spiders from flooding the machine then the machine is getting by ok. Also, does anyone have suggestions for testing once throttling is in place? I don't want to start cutting off the good customers, but I do want to get an idea how it acts under load. ab to the rescue, I suppose. Thanks much, -- Bill Moseley mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Solaris 8 lockups
What version apache/mod_perl are you running? Also, were these intel solaris 7 servers or sparc? We've recently started trying to migrate a number of Solaris 7 machines to Solaris 8, and everything seemed fine for a while. We have each box running its own static, dynamic (mod_perl) and ssl servers, and everything runs fine for 3-7 hours after starting the server. Eventually, however, the mod_perl children just stop responding. If you try to telnet into the port, the connection just hangs why trying to connect...we don't get a refused connection, and it doesn't let you connect to the point where you can issue an HTTP request. It just seems to stop responding and get stuck. Has anyone else run into any of these problems? So far we've had nothing like this happen with Solaris 7 and with Linux, but I can't even think where to start looking on Solaris 8. As a side note, this happened both on boxes that had been upgraded from 7 to 8, as well as boxes that had fresh 8 installs.
Re: Solaris 8 lockups
We had problems with that combination of apache/mod_perl, on solaris 8 as well. We switched to mod_perl 1.25 and that fixed our problems. Since then we have also moved to newer versions of apache. I would build a newer version of apache/mod_perl on one of the systems and then leave the configuration the same. (Assuming you can do that, some work environments are locked down to older versions of software.) It would be interesting to see what truss reported when you hit the server when it was not responding. - Original Message - From: Tom Servo [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Marc Slagle [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, April 18, 2002 2:14 PM Subject: Re: Solaris 8 lockups Nevermind about mod_perl version number, looks like we're running 1.24 Brian Nilsen [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Thu, 18 Apr 2002, Marc Slagle wrote: What version apache/mod_perl are you running? Also, were these intel solaris 7 servers or sparc? We've recently started trying to migrate a number of Solaris 7 machines to Solaris 8, and everything seemed fine for a while. We have each box running its own static, dynamic (mod_perl) and ssl servers, and everything runs fine for 3-7 hours after starting the server. Eventually, however, the mod_perl children just stop responding. If you try to telnet into the port, the connection just hangs why trying to connect...we don't get a refused connection, and it doesn't let you connect to the point where you can issue an HTTP request. It just seems to stop responding and get stuck. Has anyone else run into any of these problems? So far we've had nothing like this happen with Solaris 7 and with Linux, but I can't even think where to start looking on Solaris 8. As a side note, this happened both on boxes that had been upgraded from 7 to 8, as well as boxes that had fresh 8 installs.
Looking for more information...
In the next few weeks our radio show might be tackling mod_perl as a topic. I've read everything on the perl.apache.org site (and followed the links from there to take23.org, etc.) I'vereadthe mod_perl articles on perl.comas well. My question is, are there any other less-obvious places to look for information that I'm missing? We've usedmod_perl for our development for years, and are very familiar withit.Links to anyplace that might have good articles, etc. would be great. Thanks, Marc SlagleThe Fulkert Consulting Group, Inc.559 Liberty Hill, Suite 2 WestCincinnati, Ohio 45210513.665.4931http://www.fulkertconsulting.com
Re: Looking for more information...
What else do you need? There are two mod_perl books that you may wish to purchase and read, see the links on the site. Got the books too. I'm almost there, but could still use any nifty statistics, etc. Most of the stories I've seen are for defunct sites/companies. I'm creating a site to go along with the show, and would like for that episodes page to have some links for the management types to see, since we usually find that management is our main block in getting mod_perl in the door. Thanks again...
Re: modperl and SQL db select
Is there any issue with using modperl with postgres vs mysql for a database driven website? Don't want to bark up the wrong tree in a mod_perl project only to discover I picked the wrong .db :-/ http://www.mysql.com/news/article-91.html This was an interesting article, even though it didn't compare postgres to the other databases being tested. All of the mod_perl sites we have worked on use MySQL, and we have never had any problems with it. The newest versions of MySQL (4.x) also add some functionality that might have made MySQL look a bit less tempting for a developer to use in the past. Marc Slagle Secure Level 559 Liberty Hill, 2W Cincinnati, Ohio, 45210 (513) 665 4931 http://www.securelevel.com
Re: Site Host Providers that Support mod_perl?
Alright, I'm a total mod_perl newbie and would like to find a host for my personal site that allows me to develop mod_perl scripts. First off, I'm assuming that there is no way to install mod_perl on my current provider due to (obvious) access privilige restrictions to Apache? Secondly, the obvious question here, whom would you folks recommend for hosting services, assuming the afforementioned? Secure Level provides mod_perl hosting. We have two packages. The first is $80/month, and you get 4gb throughput, your own httpd/IP address, no memory limits (as long as you don't kill the server) and 25 Mb storage space. Its $65/month if you pre-pay one year. The second package is $10 less a month if you dont need your own IP address, and want to run on a non-standard port. Our facility is fed by 18 OC-192 connections, so heavy traffic isn't that much of an issue. http://www.securelevel.com Marc Slagle
Re: how to disable mod_perl in a subdir?
Maybe you can try Apache::PerlRun instead of Apache::Registry for the directories that you need to run those scripts. The perldocs show how to set it up. Marc Slagle - Original Message - From: Dan Baker [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2002 11:14 PM Subject: how to disable mod_perl in a subdir? I am working with a host that has everything under /cgi-bin running mod_perl by default, and well as using EmbPerl to run the dynamic pages. Unfortunately, I have a set of scripts that really need regular perl, and I can't seem to figure out the configuration to disable mod_perl in a specific directory that needs regular perl. ;( I tried this in the httpd.conf file: Directory /home/mydomain/cgi-bin/webadmin/ SetHandler default-handler AddHandler cgi-script .pl AllowOverride All /Directory and then ALSO editted a .htaccess file in /home/mydomain/cgi-bin/webadmin/ to include: options +ExecCGI RemoveHandler perl-script SetHandler cgi-script AddHandler cgi-script .pl and it still tries to use mod_perl?! SERVER_SOFTWARE = Apache/1.3.19 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) mod_ssl/2.8.1 OpenSSL/0.9.6 mod_perl/1.24_01 PLEASE let me know if there is a way to configure so that a specific sub-dir uses regular perl. Dan
