[OT] New persistent perl engine

[Matt Sergeant <ms...@startechgroup.co.uk>]

This may have slipped by most people, but I know the SpeedyCGI discussions
sparked quite a bit of conversation/debate earlier this year, so I thought
people might be interested here...

PPerl is a tool I wrote here at Star for running perl processes
persistently, as a daemon. The idea for it was simplicity - both in
development and in running it. Not only that, but I couldn't get SpeedyCGI
to compile, or the author to respond to me, so I wrote my own. So, it's
really easy - just use "pperl" wherever you'd have previously used "perl",
even in the shebang line.

It actually wasn't written for web apps. I wrote it for our virus checker,
which is 10K+ lines of perl code, and takes about 0.7s to load, and almost
zero time to process an email, so we needed to eliminate that 0.7s. So, the
benefit of PPerl is it's more generally usable than FastCGI or SpeedyCGI.

There are downsides, of course, like the fact that the daemon stub is
written in Perl, rather than C. And the forking version doesn't seem to work
(not sure what I've done wrong there), so it's single threaded at the moment
(the forking code is in the distro if anyone wants to try and make it work).

Anyway, let me know if this interests anyone. It's called PPerl, and it's on
CPAN.

Matt.
-- 
<:->Get a smart net</:->

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Re: [OT] New persistent perl engine

[Joshua Chamas <jo...@chamas.com>]

Matt Sergeant wrote:
> 
> It actually wasn't written for web apps. I wrote it for our virus checker,
> which is 10K+ lines of perl code, and takes about 0.7s to load, and almost
> zero time to process an email, so we needed to eliminate that 0.7s. So, the
> benefit of PPerl is it's more generally usable than FastCGI or SpeedyCGI.
> 
> There are downsides, of course, like the fact that the daemon stub is
> written in Perl, rather than C. And the forking version doesn't seem to work
> (not sure what I've done wrong there), so it's single threaded at the moment
> (the forking code is in the distro if anyone wants to try and make it work).
> 

Hey this is a great idea!  I particularly like the idea of having
it be in pure perl ... one of the drawbacks to CGI::SpeedyCGI I could
see was that so much was in C, it seems like it might be hard to port
to Win32 one day.  

If PPerl becomes viable for running web cgis, then it may be that 
a heavy web app environment like Apache::ASP could one day run
under IIS/Win2000 as a pperl CGI !!  Sounds cool.

I will try to help with this project as time permits, as I am very
interested in taking Apache::ASP to other platforms where mod_perl
is not necessarily available.

--Josh

_________________________________________________________________
Joshua Chamas                           Chamas Enterprises Inc.
NodeWorks Founder                       Huntington Beach, CA  USA 
http://www.nodeworks.com                1-714-625-4051