CGI load relative to Perl, etc. (last attempt, I promise)

[Alex Tweedly]

Richard Gaskin wrote:

> Dave Cragg wrote:
>
>>> In brief, is Rev more efficient, less efficient, or roughly on par 
>>> with other scripting languages for CGI use?
>>
>>
>> I can't give an authoratative response. But I suspect you'll find Rev 
>> compares pretty well when doing something like working with large files.
>>
>> Rev's weakpoint is that it has to load for each CGI request. When 
>> compared against something like mod-perl or ASP, which are already 
>> loaded by the http server, it can be considerably slower. But as the 
>> ratio of the time to do the task to the time to load the procees 
>> increases, I think you'll find the difference narrows.
>>
>> For what's it's worth, I use Rev CGI scripts for an educational app 
>> that runs worldwide for a few thousand users, and I've never had any 
>> comment about performance. (this is on both Windows and Linux servers)
>
>
> Encouraging.
>
> I found this on Slashdot about pros and cons of Perl vs, C, and much 
> of it applies to my choice:
> <http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/99/10/20/1246241.shtml>

I would think it would be easy to convince even a skeptic that CGI 
scripts should be written in something other than C - if only the fact 
that a very large percentage of them CGI scripts are in Perl or Python 
(or Lisp or Ruby or ...).

It may be harder to come up with good (substantiated) arguments to 
justify any particular choice between the higher-level languages. In 
essence it comes down to efficiency comparisons between the languages - 
and in almost every case the best approach is to write it and see if 
there is a performance/efficiency problem.  But moving it from a "CGI" 
question to a "general performance" question should allow you to use 
more existing apps to demonstrate efficiency of xTalk.

> The sum of posts there is pretty much an argument for Transcript as 
> well: there may be faster options, but the real bottleneck is in the 
> connection, not the processing, so the productivity gained is usually 
> a good investment.

Hmmmm - true for many CGI scripts. Not so sure it will be for you if you 
are regularly processing 10-30Mb files, and creating large number of 
small files. That sounds like a relatively intensive processing task, 
and may well not be outweighed by the communications. That's a good 
thing, because if you didn't have intense processing to do, the start-up 
times (which are avoided by mod_perl) might be significant.

-- 
Alex Tweedly       http://www.tweedly.net



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