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best apache+python module?

Cameron Laird claird at starbase.neosoft.com
Fri Jul 28 12:10:47 EDT 2000 
In article <see-9D8864.22245327072000 at news.dnai.com>,
Sam Penrose  <see at message.body> wrote:
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>After having a Bad Experience with one of these (memory leak in 
>PyApache), I must ask why they are so popular. My company writes 
>pure-Python sites whose CGIs handle tens of thousands of hits a day on 
>unremarkable Intel hardware running vanilla Linux. Two of our CGIs have 
>started to bog down recently, and in both cases the cause is the same: 
>have to generate HTML pages roughly a meg in size; one containing so 
>many images that the number of Apache processes goes through the roof. 
>In neither case would faster Python performance help.
>
>Linking your interpreter to Apache forces you into dependence on a chunk 
>of code that has orders of magnitude less testing than either Apache or 
>Python does, probably wouldn't remove any bottlenecks if they existed, 
>and may well break the next time either Python or Apache is updated.
>
>Unless, of course, you know differently. But my sense is that most of 
>the people interested in these modules merely know they want their sites 
>to run fast and have read the mod_perl marketing materials.
>
>Anyone who can afford 256 megs of RAM and a SCSI hard drive can serve 
>thousands of people a day with sites that execute thousands of lines of 
>Python, without working particularly hard to optimize their software 
>(CGIs or Python or the OS). And if they find they can't, they should not 
>assume that a persistent Python executable will help without having good 
>reason to do so.
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Sooooooooooooooo true.   I hope a lot of people see
your posting.

As it turns out, I do a lot of work with these em-
bedded extensions (mostly in languages other than
Python, but with Python, also).  My primary motiva-
tion is at the software engineering level:  I find
"microscripting" (executable content embedded in
HTML) far, far more pleasant in general to develop
and maintain than CGI.

The big performance gain I most often see from the
mod_*-like embedded extensions has to do with per-
sistent database connections.  Saving the costs of
building up and breaking *those* down can be a big
win.  Language stuff is an incidental.

People have put a lot of energy into making Apache
extensible, shaking down the mod_*()-s, and so on.
I enjoy using them.  I agree, though, that they
need to be watched carefully.  Memory leakiness is
only one of the frailties to which they're prone.
-- 

Cameron Laird <claird at NeoSoft.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html
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