[Catalyst] Scalable Catalyst

[Carl Johnstone]

I think that the mod_perl mailing list would also be interested in this - 
there are very few people on that list with practical examples of 
multi-thread. As far as I'm aware pre-fork is still pretty much the only 
model recommended.

Alejandro Imass wrote:
> Ok. What would you have done? - not meant as a defensive question but
> really, we would like to hear options for this application!

I would've probably pushed for a change in the architecture, so that the 
browser makes a request then polls for results. Don't under-estimate the 
ability of users to hammer the F5 button because the page has taken 2 
seconds longer to come back than they expected!

However I do find your choice of solution interesting, as you've essentially 
managed to get a fairly out-of-the-box solution working. There are a bunch 
of things that could be done to process this type of workload quicker, but 
with the disadvantage that you've got a bigger custom code-base to maintain.

I'm curious about the memory differences between pre-fork and threaded in 
mod_perl from your testing. General mod_perl advice is to pre-load as much 
perl code and data as possible and take advantage of the copy-on-write 
aspects of VM. Did you push this? How much difference was there between the 
models?

Carl