Re: [MacPerl] Error type 12 with .acgi

[Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>]

At 9.11 -0600 2000.01.17, David Steffen wrote:
>Consider the "standard" use first: supposing you have one or more
>Frontier .acgi's and you have a second hit on one of these before the
>first is finished processing.  Frontier will interleave processing of
>the two hits such that they finish processing and return output at
>close to the same time.  Applescript will finish processing the first
>hit, return output, and then begin work on the second hit.  MacPerl
>will drop the second hit or crash.

Not necessarily.  See below.

>What Frontier does is ideal, and
>if I was determined to do a serious website on a Mac, I'd probably
>pay the money for Frontier.

Personally, I would purchase WebTen, which is an Apache port that includes
its own Unix environment, including its own perl, which acts just like perl
on Unix.


>MacPerl cannot handle queuing, much less parallel execution.

Not quite true.  Yes, it cannot handle parallel execution, though this may
change at some point.  But the queueing may very well work, as long as
there is not a significant delay.  However, it is best not to risk it, and
use .cgi instead of .acgi.  I have successfully used .acgi for CGIs that
execute and return quickly enough.  I am not sure if the queueing is a
function of the OS or the application, but both the CGI process and the
MacPerl app can handle some degree of queueing.

Try this: run a script in MacPerl, such as:

  while (1) { print ++$x, "\n"; sleep 1 }

Now double-click a MacPerl script on the desktop.  Wait a minute.  Then
cancel the running script.  In my experience, the second script will
usually run at that point.  However, a third script very well might fail.
The point is that it may work, but don't count on it.


>Thus,
>you must never use a MacPerl .acgi on any site where there is a
>possibility of overlapping hits.  The only reason you would want to
>use an .acgi with MacPerl is to take advantage of server push.  This
>is fine for experimentation, but it would be the rare production
>website that should use .acgi with a MacPerl CGI.

Yes, I would not use MacPerl .acgi in a production environment.

-- 
Chris Nandor          mailto:pudge@pobox.com         http://pudge.net/
%PGPKey = ('B76E72AD', [1024, '0824090B CE73CA10  1FF77F13 8180B6B6'])

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