mod_perl in mid-air

Wednesday, August 23, 2000, at 03:12PM

By Eric Richardson

It's now noon in Sydney, and I'm somewhere between Chicago and LA fighting with mod_perl. You know what I love about mod_perl? The way it doesn't make any sense.

Computers are usually very comforting in their predictability. If you program it, it will work like you tell it to. Period. No questions.

Tell that to mod_perl... Random errors, presented randomly, abound. You know something's fishy when you can hit reload 10 times and get a fifty-fifty split between two completely different results.

The caching stuff is insane. I'm sure it's lightning fast and all, but I have a feeling it's going to take a lot of work before eThreads works well with it. I'm going to write some little benchmark scripts to play with the speed and see what I can expect.

I'm probably going to lay off labeling eThreads mod_perl safe until 2.0. With most operations shifted off to the persistant server, the resulting small client will be much easier to diagnose and optimize.

Oh well... Back to work. Only 18 more hours of flying. Woo hoo