Re: Another way to perhaps do this...... / SSI

[Wim Kerkhoff <wi...@merilus.com>]

Hey Ken,

You are probably right. Your Apache::SSI module looks quite simple to
extend, although the same can be said for HTML::Embperl::Syntax. The
reason I was working with the Embperl module, was that I was wanting to
change <!--#exec cgi="listsomething.cgi"--> calls to something faster. I
rewrote the cgi's in Embperl, but needed a fast way of including them
without requiring the HTML guy to learn Embperl and have to rewrite all
his pages... and Embperl.v2's new Syntax::SSI module fit the bill. 
Either way you get access to mod_perl... although if Apache::SSI is
extended, its easier to share with other mod_perl folks I suppose...

BTW, I did a couple of quick benchmarks. 

With the old mod_include system, page.shtml included headers, footers,
and exec'd a CGI twice. On a production server (dual PIII-933 Mhz
processors, SCSI, 512 MB) this resulted in 1.5 requests per second. By
the end of the test (ApacheBench) the load was at 8 or 9.

On my development system, I changed page.shtml in both places, so that
<!--#exec cgi="listsomething.cgi"--> is now <!--#include
virtual="listsomething.epl"-->. This results in 13 requests/second. This
is actually on my workstation, which is running PostgreSQL, MySQL, X,
and KDE, all on a PIII-550 Mhz system with an IDE drive and 384 MB of
memory.  By the end of the test (ApacheBench), the load was still less
then 1.

Steven, by hacked mod_include, do you mean that you hacked mod_include
to support the OAS directive, or that Real Media did this?

Ken Williams wrote:
> 
> Wim & Steven,
> 
> Wouldn't it be better to subclass Apache::SSI instead of
> HTML::Embperl::Syntax::SSI ?  That part of it would be really easy - the
> hard part would be actually implementing the OAS directive actions.
> 
> Wim Kerkhoff <wi...@merilus.com> wrote:
> > Steven Boger wrote:
> >>
> >> I've been netsearching for hours..... It's time to beg for help...
> >>
> >> My apache has a hacked mod_include that has a new directive, OAS:
> >>
> >> <!--OAS
> >> SETUP="www.realmedia.com/Samples/lx.shtml@TopLeft,TopRight,BottomLeft,
> >> BottomRight"-->
> >>
> >> <!--OAS AD="BottomRight"-->
> >>
> >> Can I somehow run those directives right from mod_perl????
> >
> > Well... Since I've been spending several hours looking at the
> > HTML::Embperl::Syntax::SSI module (Embperl.v2), I'm going to suggest
> > that you might be able to extend Embperl's SSI syntax to do what the
> > mod_include hack does.  This means that can parse the directive, let OAS
> > do its thing, and at the same time have direct access to the request
> > object...
> >
> > But then, I know squat about OAS and what it does, so this may not be
> > all that feasible :-)