"Troy Johnson" <Troy.A.Johnson at state.mn.us> writes:

> David,
> 
> <WARNING: This may be wrong for any number of reasons ;-)>

> Regular Perl CGI programs are spawned by a web server for every
> request made of them, and so have a Perl interpreter startup cost
> and memory usage in addition to that of the web server
> (httpd). Mod_perl makes the Perl interpreter part of the httpd
> itself, so that startup costs are negated and memory usage is less
> (compared to the full blown interpreter), but it also beefs up
> _every_ httpd (could be compiled in or dynamically loaded, but the
> effect is the same). Not a huge deal if you only server dynamic
> content, but a waste if you serve up lots of images or static pages
> and only a few dynamic pages.

> It is probably because you _can_ be ignorant of mod_perl vs. Perl
> CGI execution (mostly) that the diffence isn't obvious. The mod_perl
> folks have taken pains to make sure that Perl CGIs will run under
> mod_perl with little or no modification.

So, are you saying that simply by installing mod_perl, the handling of
perl CGIs on my site gets changed, and handled in the persistent
module instead of as a normal CGI?  That seems like an *awfully* big
thing for me to have missed seeing in the docs, but stupider things
have happened in my presence before!

By the way, each of your paragraphs appears to have been sent as a
single line; I had to rewrap to get decent-looking quoting.
-- 
David Dyer-Bennet      /      Welcome to the future!      /      dd-b at dd-b.net
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