I know this sound like a question for ServerFault but I know that developers often get the blame when servers are struggling so I thought a post here might be useful to people who still use Perl on the web.
THE STORY:
We had serious issues with defunct processes on our old Apache server so we decided to move to Apache 2. The new server performs much better, no denying that. Tests reveal however, that under a heavy load (~100 users per minute) defunct processes start quickly ramping up on the server and using SSH it is clear that these processes are using the CPU. To overcome these issues we decided to implement CGI::Fast which is a type of FastCGI in Perl. Having that in place the zombies are gone, however performance wise the server is not coping any better.
The results led me to assume that there isn’t really a point implementing CGI::Fast if Apache 2 will efficiently reclaim the resources anyway.
Does any of you have come to a different conlusion?
In my opinion it’s not worth moving to anything but a PSGI/Plack-based solution in 2011, independent of any other details you mentioned.