[Lazarus] fpWeb - Apache Modules

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Fri, 23 Jan 2009, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 11:43 AM, Henry Vermaak <henry.vermaak at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > just for interest sake, have you measured how long it takes to set up
> > the connection relative to how long the network transfer takes?  it'll
> > obviously be dependant on the connection speed, but i get the feeling
> > that it's minimal.
> 
> Yes I have, and so did other users of tiOPF.  The Connect/Disconnect
> part of a database takes considerably longer than retrieving a subset
> of data. And with the way CGI applications work, they
> connect/disconnect very often (each screen refresh).

All depends on how your CGI application works.
For any reasonably user-friendly application screen buildup usually 
requires so many queries that the startup time is dwarfed.

Take the mantis bugtracker: it runs more than 40 queries to show certain
pages ('My view' page takes 45) , and needs sometimes up to 100 Mb (!!) 
to display a single page. I had to increase the allowed memory per page
in php.ini to be able to run Mantis.

In such cases, reverting to CGI will IMHO result in a speed gain. 
PHP has become so bloated that it slows with every release.

For simple CGI's a lot can be improved by caching some things in the
session data, which you of course should not store in the database.
If you need to run a query on the database to display the user name
in the top-right corner of your web-page, your design is basically 
flawed.

Not to mention that CGI (or apache modules) are less prone to attacks
than the ubiquitous interpreted PHP...

Michael.