Re: cgi or mod_perl

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I server quite a few CGI scripts from a fairly slow server, and the problem is that although perl scripts will run very fast, it's very slow to create new processes, initialise perl, and load all the modules before my script starts its work.

mod_perl solves this one by having all the modules loaded in advanced, and it's registry modules can cache compiled scripts in memory. But it's rather complicated, and your memory usage can get out of hand if you aren't watching, so I tried FastCGI. It's much simpler.

Rather than loading the script into apache, it creates a process for the script a lot like CGI, but it then just keeps on reusing it rather than discarding it after one use. The other advantage is that using CGI::Fast it's easy to convert your CGI scripts to FastCGI.

So my suggestion is that if you're starting out with Perl is to go with CGI since it's simpler, and you do have room to expand to mod_perl or FastCGI later.