On Mon, Aug 30, 2004 at 02:12:27PM -0400, Perrin Harkins wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-08-29 at 11:53, Martin RJ Cleaver wrote:

[ Got a pointer to this thread, so just responding to clear a few things
up ]

> > https://panel.dreamhost.com/kbase/index.cgi?area=2446 says:

> > "We do not support mod_perl on our shared hosting plans.
> >
> > We're sorry about this; the problem is that mod-perl is just
> > too much of a memory hog to attach to Apache (the web serving
> > software), and it introduces a great deal of instability to our
> > systems.

> You can do things under mod_perl like load tons of stuff into a
> global variable, but that would be the programmer's fault, not
> mod_perl's.

Right - but in a shared hosting environment, especially a mostly
automated one, we have very little control over customers' code. And,
since we have (a lot) more than one customer on each instance of Apache,
mod_perl allows customers to write code that will either prevent the
Apache from starting at all, or even bring down an entire machine (hence
the "instability" comment). Providing an entire instance of Apache for
each mod_perl site isn't really feasible for us either.

I'll see if we can update the kbase entry to be a little more specific
and not to sound so much like we're blaming mod_perl itself (not our
intent).

We used to support mod_perl on shared hosting plans; it caused too
many problems for us. I'm not aware of (m)any large webhosts that
provide this... but I fully encourage someone who /absolutely/ needs
to run mod_perl for some reason to either look into our dedicated
plans, or to try a host which does support mod_perl on their shared
hosting plans.

> As for stability, businesses use mod_perl to handle their mission
> critical sites every day. It's as stable as any other web
> development system. This sounds like FUD to me, or blaming someone's
> bad code on mod_perl instead of the coder.

But businesses don't just let various random people off the street
write code and then load it on their servers.

We use mod_perl (extensively) ourselves for our own ("mission
critical") web stuff, including our web panel. We like mod_perl.

Regards,
Will Yardley (of DreamHost)


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