modperl-pperl_a_simple_way_of_doing_perl_daemons

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To: "'modperl@apache.org'" <modperl@apache.org>
From: Matt Sergeant <msergeant@startechgroup.co.uk>
Subject: [OT] New persistent perl engine
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 09:03:41 -0000

This may have slipped by most people, but I know the SpeedyCGI discussions
sparked quite a bit of conversation/debate earlier this year, so I thought
people might be interested here...

PPerl is a tool I wrote here at Star for running perl processes
persistently, as a daemon. The idea for it was simplicity - both in
development and in running it. Not only that, but I couldn't get SpeedyCGI
to compile, or the author to respond to me, so I wrote my own. So, it's
really easy - just use "pperl" wherever you'd have previously used "perl",
even in the shebang line.

It actually wasn't written for web apps. I wrote it for our virus checker,
which is 10K+ lines of perl code, and takes about 0.7s to load, and almost
zero time to process an email, so we needed to eliminate that 0.7s. So, the
benefit of PPerl is it's more generally usable than FastCGI or SpeedyCGI.

There are downsides, of course, like the fact that the daemon stub is
written in Perl, rather than C. And the forking version doesn't seem to work
(not sure what I've done wrong there), so it's single threaded at the moment
(the forking code is in the distro if anyone wants to try and make it work).

Anyway, let me know if this interests anyone. It's called PPerl, and it's on
CPAN.

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