Sure, mod_perl is quite good at this. I've worked on or with a number of of mod_perl-based site: Yahoo! Pipes, their internal configuration management system, and at my job at WhiteHat Security. In addition, Shopzilla and Ticketmaster are both Perl-based (I *think* they're mod_perl, but I don't know the codebases).
In short, Perl can be a good alternative for a high-performance website. You will need to add caching and multiple servers to handle a really big load. It's better to architect for this at the start rather than later, so database replication and somebody like nginx or Squid to distribute requests are already part of the first implementation; that way you won't have to shoehorn them in later,which costs time when you don't have it (production is falling over under load, and you realize that the problem is that your architecture doesn't allow you to expand).If they're already in place, it should be a relatively simple exercise to just add more capacity and nodes to keep up with demand. | [reply] [Watch: Dir/Any] |
mod_perl/apache is good but you should also explore the fast-cgi route.
Then you have a choice of web-servers. | [reply] [Watch: Dir/Any] |
Well, it all depends on how you go about it. We cannot say for sure, because we don't know how you program, what type of server you will be using, or what modules you plan to use. You would have to tell us that first. ;-)
Do Mod-Perl be sufficient to hold performance issue?
mod_perl was designed to give a boost to Perl applications -- I would hope it doesn't give performance issues.
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It all depends. What are you going to do? How much requests are you going to serve at peak time? How many servers? How much memory are you going to use? How heavy will your requests be? How fast are they (that is, can they quickly return an answer, or are you tying up resources cause you first have to fetch data from a database?)
There are many E-commerce sites that run well on modperl. There are many sites that don't, but could have. No doubt there are many E-commerce sites that do run on modperl, and perform poorly. And the most successful ones will hit limits 6 times a day, and 10 times on Sundays. One day it's the database, and when that is fixed, it'll be the network, and when that is fixed, it'll be the framework, and if that is fixed, we start all over again. | [reply] [Watch: Dir/Any] |
Before diving too deeply into whether to use mod_perl or Plack, I suggest that you thoroughly research the very-large field about e-commerce sites in general. It sounds to me like you are considering starting from scratch, and that is a mistake today. Quite frankly, there are now so many good vendors out there, who will take care of messy issues like PCI compliance on your behalf, that (up to an obvious and easily-understood point...) I seriously question the wisdom of building anything “new.”
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