"James W. Blackwell" wrote:
>
> Greetings,
>
> I've been serving some fairly heavy perl CGI/MySQL stuff lately and
> am looking for a way to speed things up a bit.
>
> The interaction is between 2 Linux boxes connected via a 100Mb
> switch. I've got Debian on the box running the perl CGI stuff under
> apache (not mod_perl) and Red Hat on the MySQL box.
>
> My question is if I could upgrade only one of these boxes, which
> would give more bang for the buck? Do you reach a point of
> saturation where if you have a box that is pretty hot you wouldn't
> see much improvement by upgrading a bit?
First thing you should do is upgrading your software. Mod_perl is
*much* more performant than CGI is. Thanks to Apache::Registry
there's even a good chance you need not modify your sources or at
least not too much. Note in particular that mod_perl allows you to
make use of persistent connections by means of
PerlModule Apache::DBI
in your httpd.conf.
However, if you are still lacking performance, it cannot be said
what the bottleneck is: It depends too much on the application.
As for the database machine: The machine's load should be a clear
indicator whether you need to upgrade or not. Giving a similar
indicator for the webserver machine is hard, but if the load exceeds
2 or 3 permanently, you should still be winning a lot. (The load
is not the only indicator. For example disk I/O doesn't hit the
load that much in some configurations.)
Bye,
Jochen
--
Jochen Wiedmann joe@stripped
Life has brown and green eyes. :-) +49 7123 14887
