best apache+python module?

[Sam Penrose]

In article <20000728113918.B12152 at inkontact.com.au>, Steve Purcell 
<stephen_purcell at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Jason Ives wrote:
> > 
> > I've been looking for an apache module that will run python .cgi's 
> > without
> > having to instantiate a new interpreter for each request. [snip] They 
> > all
> > seem rather sparsely supported..
> 
> Check out PCGI:
>   http://www.digicool.com/releases/pcgi 
> 
> There's a HOWTO here:
>   http://starship.python.net/crew/jbauer/persistcgi/howto/index.html 
> 
> -Steve


After having a Bad Experience with one of these (memory leak in 
PyApache), I must ask why they are so popular. My company writes 
pure-Python sites whose CGIs handle tens of thousands of hits a day on 
unremarkable Intel hardware running vanilla Linux. Two of our CGIs have 
started to bog down recently, and in both cases the cause is the same: 
have to generate HTML pages roughly a meg in size; one containing so 
many images that the number of Apache processes goes through the roof. 
In neither case would faster Python performance help.

Linking your interpreter to Apache forces you into dependence on a chunk 
of code that has orders of magnitude less testing than either Apache or 
Python does, probably wouldn't remove any bottlenecks if they existed, 
and may well break the next time either Python or Apache is updated.

Unless, of course, you know differently. But my sense is that most of 
the people interested in these modules merely know they want their sites 
to run fast and have read the mod_perl marketing materials.

Anyone who can afford 256 megs of RAM and a SCSI hard drive can serve 
thousands of people a day with sites that execute thousands of lines of 
Python, without working particularly hard to optimize their software 
(CGIs or Python or the OS). And if they find they can't, they should not 
assume that a persistent Python executable will help without having good 
reason to do so.

-- 
spenrose at well dot com