Question

I was just wondering what is best for performance when making a web service in Perl.

Is it best to have as short as possible .pl script and put as much code as possible in a module that is used by the .pl script, or doesn’t it impact performance if i don’t use a module at all?

I am using mod_perl on a CentOS Linux box with perl 5.8.8.

Answer 1

Since you’re using mod_perl, there is no appreciable performance penalty in spreading your code across as many files as you like. Using modules, small, testable functions, and an object-oriented structure for your code will make it much more maintainable, reusable, and extensible. And you don’t need a .pl script at all, since you’re using mod_perl. Just do something like:

httpd.conf

PerlModule My::WebApp
<Location /app>
    SetHandler perl-script
    PerlHandler My::WebApp
</Location>

My/WebApp.pm

package My::WebApp;

use strict;
use warnings;

use Apache2::Const -compile => qw(OK);

sub handler { 
    my $r = shift;    # apache request object

    # do stuff

    return Apache2::Const::OK;
}

Using a web application framework makes it even easier. CGI::Application has excellent mod_perl support built in.