Perl scripts making my site slow

kingdean has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a bunch of little perl scripts running. Each page calls upon a small perl script and is generated on the fly. So if 10 people visit that page the page is generated for each of them each time. How can I say, once an hour or so, have the page generated so that when someone goes to that page it is never generated on the fly? It is a regular .html file, the perl scrips are calling upon other .html files about 25k-100k each, and the scripts cut info from other pages on my site so that I have have the same info show up on many pages. I know this isn't the best way to probably do this, but it is working now and I don't want to change the system yet. Any help on this would be appreciated! Thanks Dean

Comment on Perl scripts making my site slow

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Re: Perl scripts making my site slow by jeffa (Bishop) on Jun 25, 2004 at 18:49 UTC
You could set up a cron job that ran each script and directed it's output to the appropriate file. You would probably want to lock the files first, to prevent someone from a requesting page at the moment it was being updated. I would be very tempted to solve this problem with Template Toolkit's ttree utility. This looks like the kind of job that tool was made for. jeffa L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L-- -R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B-- H---H---H---H---H---H--- (the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)	[reply]
Re^2: Perl scripts making my site slow by kingdean (Novice) on Jun 25, 2004 at 19:49 UTC
Jeff, I am a novice, but I am learning. Let me give you an idea what I was thinking about and you tell me if this makes sense. If I update my index.html file, I upload it and everything is fine. The index.html calls upon several pages and updates automatically. If I put this index.html file in a directory say... (www.mysite.com/dontgohere/index.html) and I make a cron job look at that file and run it, then dump the page as a visitor would see in html into the file (www.mysite.com/index.html). Then when someone accesses my main page, it is just a html file and shouldn't be slow. Does this sound like it would work? Thanks Dean	[reply]
Re^3: Perl scripts making my site slow by jeffa (Bishop) on Jun 25, 2004 at 19:56 UTC
That sounds like it should work, but we are leaving out the specifics. Why don't you try this. Write a cron job that runs one of these scripts you speak of. Have it write the output to some .html file that a user will view. Set the cron job for every minute or 5 minutes until you get it working correctly, then set it to run ever a hour or two. If you have problems with this, then ask us specific questions about that in a new thread. Then, once you get all of that working ... you can look into Template Toolkit should you want to "upgrade" your system. ;) Cheers and good luck! jeffa L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L-- -R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B-- H---H---H---H---H---H--- (the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)	[reply]
Re: Perl scripts making my site slow by Grygonos (Chaplain) on Jun 25, 2004 at 19:12 UTC
Alternatively, you can check the timestamp of the file and compare it against current time, to see if the current page request should generate a new file. (Whilst locking the files such as jeffa suggested). This is a better suggestion if you're on a webserver where you can't use cron jobs. Grygonos	[reply]

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