Hi,
I saw that there were requests for success stories, so here is ours.
We had to create 21 websites that basically had the same textual content
(but different ads+clickthroughs, different designs, different acces rights,
etc...), that needed to sometimes remain unseen and act as gateways to other
sites, and sometimes show up, with changing content and links according to
user rights. Also, it had to answer search engine bots with different
content using yet another database of robot user agents, as well as (coupled
with LWP stuff) try to relate automatic posting to search engine databases
to bots that came visiting (I know this isn't really good, but then, food is
sometimes more important, :-( ) and to optimise meta tags, resubmission,
etc...
It's all done in mod_perl, and in three days time it served a bit
more than 4 million mod_perl hits, and submitted 180.000 forms to search
engines. Everything's running on a 300mhz x86, with 128megs of ram. As a
comparison, the early development tests were done using CGI on the same PC,
and ASP on a more powerful one running IIS. We also tried using java
servlets but the results were so desperate that I will not mention them here
in respect for those people that use them. Given the time it took either for
the CGI to be finished, or for the ASP to connect to it's SQL Server 6.5 to
yield the right results or send the right page, we had been planning to buy
5 other PCs to get the job done with those solutions. Our benchmarks run
with about 15.000 iterations of a series of calls to the servers that were
under no other load show that ASP is hardly faster than CGI when database
access is used (and then you have to take into account the fact that the ASP
PC was fairly stronger, (I don't remember the CPU but it had 512megs of
ram), but that mod_perl induces a performance increase of around 1100% !!!
Also, it seems to be using less ressources (though I haven't tested that
fully), or using them for so short time lapses that one doesn't even notice.
The mod_perl development of the whole project was done by one person
in less than three weeks (stress-testing included) , and it is running
flawlessly.
I am looking for something stronger, but all that comes to mind is a deeply
heart-felt "Thanks !".
Abigaël Duesberg
ASP - Lotus - LiveWire - Perl - Java
