Perl for Web Site Management

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 ...