[Catalyst] Development environments and performance

[Peter Edwards]

Carl wrote:
>From: "Jonathan Rockway" <jon at jrock.us>
>> If you are using the same Apache process for more than one web
>> app, You're Doing It Wrong (tm).
>
>For development or production?
>
>In production as long as you're using the same versions of Cat for your 
>apps, I would've thought the memory gains would make it worthwhile. If 
>you've got multiple sets of apache processes, then each set will load all 
>the Catalyst (and other CPAN modules) into memory separately.

Imagine your app has module MyApp::Registration and you and a colleague are
both working on it and have different versions. That will cause a namespace
collision. Whoever uses Apache mod_perl first after it starts will have
their module loaded. All subsequent callers will share that in-memory
version.

On a shared dev host you can run backend Apaches on different ports, one per
developer, and your life will be less painful. Memory is cheap.

Or use a VMWare instance on your dev PC, which is what we do. A dual core
CPU with para-virtualization chipset and 2GB memory is plenty good enough
and not expensive. I think our office server (for those
need-a-shared-dev-platform days) which has a considerably higher spec cost
about 750EUR. It also taught me to hate Windows Vista with a vengeance. The
Slashdot news podcast's joke about this fantastic upgrade for Vista that
turns out to be Windows XP almost made cry, but that's another story.

For day to day development, I use fastcgi because it's less hassle and
quicker to restart but for production I'm a lot happier with mod_perl.

Regards, Peter
http://perl.dragonstaff.co.uk