On 2024-08-08 22:51, Mithun Bhattacharya wrote:
So I am a mod_perl user for about 25 years now - pretty much I started
with
perl and mod_perl together :)
Looking at the conversation I can see it is diverging into two parts -
one
what to do with mod_perl and in general concerns with Perl.
Yes we have alternatives to mod_perl and you should definitely consider
Mojolicious if that suits your requirement but for that you need to
understand what mod_perl is offering.
mod_perl is allowing you to leverage apache as a foundation to handle
HTTP
requests while your code does whatever business needs you have to
fulfill.
To give an example - this is 1999 the internet has realized you could
hack
open SQL Servers on the internet using scripts. Now I am managing a
website
for a startup running a production server with 128MB RAM I think. Now
imagine all the script kiddies hammering away at your webserver looking
for
SQL Server when you have only apache and mysql :( For the first three
days
our server was pretty much dead - it would maybe honor a request every
few
minutes. To solve it I add a PerlTransHandler and drop all requests for
the
nasty endpoints - guess what we are back online with no impact to the
server any more.
Another example - we learnt you could write Apache configuration in
perl -
it blew our mind. Rest assured most people dont know about this
capability
so God forbid you are stuck trying to solve something in this you will
not
find anything on Google. What we did was templatized the complete
Apache
config. We have clean segregation of which Location and LocationMatch
urls
need which library. We use a for loop to apply auth on everything and
our
configs are very easy to understand for perl programmers and it is very
compact.
Company decided everyone needed SSL - most teams needed to plan it out.
We
just included mod_ssl get the certificates and updated our config and
we
were done in three days. Need to add custom header on every request -
done
in two lines.
We need to use the application in a variety of server configs - no
problem
we compute the number of child processes to spawn at run time.
Have a low latency service which needs to respond fast - changed the
logging to report the processing time as Aapche knows.
Thanks Mithun for sharing so many Application Scenarios to us.
They do sound great.
What we learnt you do mod_perl if you have a plan to leverage apache.
If
you have a big fat application where receiving the request is a minor
part
of the solution then we split it up and handle the request in mod_perl
and
then hand over the hard work to a farm of servers. This way your
mod_perl
instance scales based on the volume of requests and the workers scale
based
on the amount of work to be done.
Ah yes, I am doing this on our side. we have a farm of mp servers,
splitting the requests across all servers.
Now why is it not popular - primarily because it was so difficult to
setup initially. Most people did not have access to control apache
config
and they did not know what could be done. The community did not help
encourage it either. I do not have root access on our servers -who
cares. I
have my own relocatable apache, own relocatable perl running on a non
standard port and I dont bother any super user for help.
In now days configuration is not a hard job if you like to learn.
everyone can get a VPS from the cloud provider with low cost. :)
--
regards,
Jeff Pang
