2.8 Is This All We Need to Know About mod_perl?

So do you need to know more about mod_perl? The answer is, "Yes and no."

Just as with Perl, effective scripts can be written even with very little mod_perl knowledge. With the basic unoptimized setup presented in this chapter, visitor counters and guestbooks and any other CGI scripts you use will run much faster and amaze your friends and colleagues, usually without your changing a single line of code.

However, although a 50 times improvement in guestbook response times is great, a very heavy service with thousands of concurrent users will suffer under a delay of even a few milliseconds. You might lose a customer, or even many of them.

When testing a single script with the developer as the only user, squeezing yet another millisecond from the response time seems unimportant. But it becomes a real issue when these milliseconds add up at the production site, with hundreds or thousands of users concurrently generating requests to various scripts on the site. Users are not merciful nowadays. If there is another site that provides the same kind of service significantly faster, chances are that users will switch to the competing site.

Testing scripts on an unloaded machine can be very misleading—everything might seem so perfect. But when they are moved into a production environment, chances are that the scripts will not behave as well as they did on the development box. For example, the production machine may run out of memory on very busy services. In Chapter 10, we will explain how to optimize code to use less memory and how to make as much memory as possible shared.

Debugging is something that some developers prefer not to think about, because the process can be very tedious. Learning how to make the debugging process simpler and more efficient is essential for web programmers. This task can be difficult enough when debugging CGI scripts, but it can be even more complicated with mod_perl. Chapter 21 explains how to approach debugging in the mod_perl environment.

mod_perl has many features unavailable under mod_cgi for working with databases. Some of the most important are persistent database connections. Persistent database connections require a slightly different approach, explained in Chapter 20.

Most web services, especially those aimed at an international audience, must run nonstop, 24 x 7. But at the same time, new scripts may need to be added and old ones removed, and the server software will need upgrades and security fixes. And if the server goes down, fast recovery is essential. These issues are considered in Chapter 5.

Finally, the most important aspect of mod_perl is the mod_perl API, which allows intervention at any or every stage of request processing. This provides incredible flexibility, allowing the creation of scripts and processes that would simply be impossible with mod_cgi.

There are many more things to learn about mod_perl and web programming in general. The rest of this book will attempt to provide as much information as possible about these and other related matters.