Apache Server Administration and mod_perl
At the
point when you move beyond
serving your web pages in a shared hosting environment, you will
probably start dealing with web server configuration, which, for the
large majority of those in a Unix-like environment, means Apache
server configuration. Figuring out how the various Apache server
configuration directives work is actually pretty easy, once you get
the hang of it; you typically just need to make a change in the
server’s
httpd.conf
file, then restart the server for the
changes to take effect. It’s all fairly well documented in the
comments contained in the httpd.conf file itself,
and in the documentation reachable via http://www.apache.org/.
Once you’ve been using Perl and Apache for a while,
you’re going to start hearing about
mod_perl
(http://perl.apache.org/), which, for a
Perl-using web developer, is one of the coolest things about having
your own server to play with, rather than being in a shared hosting
environment. Among other things, mod_perl solves
the CGI-script performance problem.
That problem is this: suppose you have a moderately popular web site
being served by an Apache server. As long as the large majority of
the requests coming into the server are for static HTML pages, you
will be fine. Apache will fork off a lot of child
httpd processes, which will take turns handling
the incoming requests. Apache’s httpd processes are fairly small in terms of memory footprint, and they all typically share the memory that ...