Hmmm... I was wondering about that, lately. You see, I inherited a big, ugly application that does a lot of RESTful calls. To its credit, there is an extremely consistent logic to the way those calls are done, and the implementation is as orthagonal and “tight” as one might wish for ... but it’s mod_perl, and it’s big.
So, one of the things that I did to it ... and now I’m wondering about the “goodness” of it ... is to require each of the REST handlers when, and if, a call to that handler actually comes in. (All of the possible handlers originate from exactly one name-space, so it isn’t like we don’t have a complete list of what modules could be invoked.) The idea is to demand-load those handlers which might not be routinely used in every lifespan of a particular Apache process, in hope that these processes might use considerably fewer megabytes apiece than they once did.
Did I sin? Must I do penance?