Re: Tomcat, CGI scripts and DBI connection persistence

[Perlbotics]

FCGI could solve your problem with the persistent DB connection, however AFAIK Tomcat does not support FCGI out of the box. Though there seems to be a working JFastCGI servlet... (never tried it myself).

Another idea would be to emulate FCGI by creating a daemon that implements your service and interfaces with a stub CGI script, e.g. by means of (domain-)sockets? Thus, the daemon maintains a permanent connection to the DB and handles request forwarded from the CGI stub.

    client <-(HTTP)-> Tomcat <-(CGI)-> CGI-stub <-(IPC)-> Daemon <-DBI
+-> DB

Very awkward and probably not much faster than simply re-connecting to the DB... Maybe it's easier to stay with Tomcat and write a servlet (Java) or stay with the Perl (F)CGI script and use a Perl based HTTP server (e.g. Starman, Twiggy, HTTP::Server::*)? Perhaps you can have two servers running (Tomcat and Perl-HTTP-server) and edit the CGI URIs, so CGI calls get routed to the Perl HTTP server?

Very awkward again... I would negotiate with customer or boss again to get rid of this artificial limitation. Why spend time and energy circumventing a problem that could be solved better the traditional way?

HTH