What mod_ perl Is and How It Works
When Apache receives a request for a static HTML file, it can serve the request directly by opening the file and writing it out over the network to the client. This is not true for programs, such as the Perl cgi-bin scripts we wrote in Chapter 2. Those scripts aren’t processed by Apache itself. Instead, Apache starts up Perl as an external process and returns its output to the requesting client. This works well for extending Apache’s capabilities, but invoking an external program taxes the Web server host and also introduces some delay into serving the request. This overhead is incurred repeatedly as script requests arrive because Apache starts up a new Perl process to handle each one.
An alternative to running ...
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