perlmeditation
technojosh
So I have been using perl at work for about 4 years now. My level is definately novice. Use it for quite a few things, but one of them always was an internal website.<p>
I learned perl through no formal method, and basically had taken over a large group of cgi-bin perl stuff. The internal site, has, in the last year or so, started housing and displaying a very large amount of content. The code has basically been nothing but maintained by me over the years, with a few features thrown in here and there for whatever reason. As the site's complexity grew, it had been getting very slow (some pages were taking upwards of 4/5 seconds to load)<p>
Now, to the point of this meditation...<p>
It is no surprise that when researching around the web about perl/cgi scripts, one often gets referred to <a href="http://perl.apache.org">mod_perl</a>. About a week ago i decided to figure out what it was all about and see if it would work for the aforementioned site.<p>
How do you quantify something that installs so easy (I was able to use PPM to install it), and immediately returns such a gain in performance? I feel like i was living in the dark ages running stuff in cgi. After adjusting some of the code to work in a mod_perl environment, the site is running so fast there's barely a load time for any of the pages, and the others at work who use it (non-perl weirdos, geez) are amazed at the gains in performance.<p>
That is all, just a perl/mod_perl success story for my fellow monks