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[Curtis H. Wilbar Jr.]

>From: Dave McGuire
>
>On Monday, September 8, 2003, at 03:45 PM, Curtis H. Wilbar Jr. wrote:
>> For this application I wouldn't even consider C.
>
>   Why?

Because I wouldn't want the constant overhead of forking processes
and launching binaries over and over and over....

>
>> Perl is growing up for this app.  This is a web based app.  If
>> you run modPerl, then your perl will be resident and the cgi will
>> not need to launch another process/etc.
>
>   It'd still be much slower than C.  Perl's performance problems aren't 
>all due to interpreter startup overhead.  And the last time I ran a 
>server-resident Perl interpreter, it had to be restarted every few 
>weeks due to memory leaks and memory fragmentation.  My servers stay up 
>for months (if not years) at a time, so I find this unacceptable.

Sure.. it might be faster than C from a pure execution standpoint... but
we're not just talking about pure code execution efficiency... 

I've never run a server resident Perl interpreter... so I can not comment
on how good/bad/stable/unstable they are... I can only comment from a
theoretical perspective.

My server stay up and running for months too if not years... and my
believe is unless I'm changing hardware, a box should never need to be
rebooted, a process restarted, etc.... now of course sometimes we don't
have ideal conditions, but I like everything to stick to that ideal as
best as possible.

>
>>   PHP is also a good choice for this application.... even JSP would 
>> probably be good.
>
>   I'd agree with PHP (though it's still nowhere near as fast as C) but 
>I think JSP would be overkill.

PHP would be my key choice.  JSP probably would be overkill and I don't
know enough about it to really compare.

>
>> While C is fast... each link the bot hits is going to cause the
>> web browser to launch the application for each link traversed... since
>> the design is links to self along with garbage addresse to pollute
>> their lists, a language that is resident with your web server is best
>> (IMHO of course).
>
>   I agree with this point, though if written in C, the fork()/exec() 
>overhead for such a small program won't be all that bad.

It probably wouldn't be... but it would be nice to avoid the overhead
anyway.  And given the small size of this application a resident language
such as Perl via modPerl, or PHP via the PHP/Zend engine would not
be inefficient enough as to merit an advantage with going with an external
program and all that is necessary to start/run/support that (fork, exec,
brk, memory management, process table entry management by the OS, etc)
if you have an internal language/interpreter available through the
interface application (web server).

>
>   An even better way would be to write it in C as an Apache module.  
>Anybody here ever program against the Apache module API?

That probably would be better (from a pure speed/efficienty aspect).  I'd
still choose PHP... easy to use, easy to update, no worries (from the
PHP code that I'd write) if Apache changes interface methodologies, etc.

>
>        -Dave


-- Curt

Curtis Wilbar
Hawk Mountain Networks

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