←back to thread

Serving 200M requests per day with a CGI-bin

(jacob.gold)
166 points feep | 2 comments | 04 Jul 25 13:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.417s | source
Show context
perlgeek ◴[04 Jul 25 19:38 UTC] No.44467268[source]▶
CGI scripts were one of the reason that perl was optimized for a quick startup time.

I just did a `time perl -e ''` (starting perl, executing an empty program), it took 5ms. 33ms with python3, 77ms with ruby.

replies(1): >>44467476 #
cb321 ◴[04 Jul 25 20:06 UTC] No.44467476[source]▶
While all you say is true, it bears note that it didn't need to be decisive. The current mob branch of tcc is such that a `#!/bin/tcc -run` "script" is about 1.3x faster than perl</dev/null on two CPUs I tried.

Besides your two slower examples, Julia and Java VMs and else thread PHP also have really big start up times. As I said up top, people just get addicted to "big environments". Lisp culture would do that with images and this is part of where the "emacs is bloated" meme came from.

Anyway, at the time getline wasn't even standardized (that was 2008 POSIX - and still not in Windows; facepalm emoji), but you could write a pretty slick little library for CGI in a few hundred..few thou' lines of C. Someone surely even did.

But things go by "reputation" and people learn what their friends tell them to, by and large. So, CGI was absolutely the thing that made the mid to late 90s "Perl's moment".

replies(1): >>44478101 #
1. dolmen ◴[06 Jul 25 05:33 UTC] No.44478101[source]▶
CGI is not anymore a major use case for Perl. The modern Perl web apps are built on PSGI and production deployment is as a long lived Perl process.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Perl startup time has drifted. Need benchmark.

replies(1): >>44479334 #
2. cb321 ◴[06 Jul 25 10:03 UTC] No.44479334[source]▶
The major modern use case I know of is command-line utilities which also benefit from low start-up. Of course, that doesn't mean there hasn't been "perf rot" over the decades as you say. Such rot should never surprise anyone. :-)

Some perl5 lover should take the time to compile all those 5.6 to 5.42 versions on the same host OS/CPU and do a performance comparison and create a nice chart for the world to trap and maybe correct such performance regressions. I just tried getting 5.8.9 to compile on modern Linux with gcc-15, and it seemed like a real PITA. (Earlier didn't even ./Configure -des right.)