[Koha-devel] Koha and mod perl

[David Cook]

I've been using mod_perl on a different project lately, and I think Paul is right about why mod_perl might not have worked well in the past and probably works better now. As far as I know, both mod_perl and Plack gain "persistence" through a combination of pre-loading Perl modules and caching compiled code. (

If you do run into problems, I imagine they might be subtle at this point? With the mod_perl project, I notice that we still have some variable scope issues where values sometimes get cached in unexpected ways. 

As for Paul's Question 2, I think most projects these days are favouring Plack/PSGI.  I think mod_perl might be a bit old-fashioned these days, although it certainly seems to work well still.

David Cook
Systems Librarian
Prosentient Systems
72/330 Wattle St, Ultimo, NSW 2007

> -----Original Message-----
> From: koha-devel-bounces at lists.koha-community.org [mailto:koha-devel-
> bounces at lists.koha-community.org] On Behalf Of Paul Poulain
> Sent: Wednesday, 27 May 2015 7:33 PM
> To: koha-devel at lists.koha-community.org
> Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] Koha and mod perl
> 
> Le 27/05/2015 11:22, Gaetan Boisson a écrit :
> >  Hello all,
> Hello,
> > has anyone set up mod perl on a koha instance? And if so, are there
> > any bugs or issues doing this?
> Theory : Plack & mod_perl are using the same kind of idea to embed Perl (for
> Plack it's in specific plackup/starman process, for mod_perl it's in Apache
> itself).
> 
> The reason why mod_perl was not working well are probably the same
> reason why Plack was not working well (ie: nested sub & variable scope
> problem). They have been fixed for supporting Plack, it's not a surprise to me
> that they fixed the mod_perl problems.
> 
> It also mean that the performance improvement should also be comparable.
> 
> Question 1: what could make us face problem with Plack that does not
> appear on mod_perl ?
> Question 2: why should we prefer Plack vs mod_perl ? (in the short term
> and/or in the long term) Question 3: any side effect that we haven't found
> yet ?
> > It seems we tried it some time ago, and this page says there are
> > issues, but doesn't give more details:
> > http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Koha_Tuning
> >
> > We have been testing it today and i haven't seen serious issues so
> > far. From the wiki it seems the latest tests were made 4 years ago, so
> > it's possible things have changed in Koha and mod_perl.
> >
> > It's something worth trying at any rate, because the mod perl
> > documentation claims "400% to 2000%" performance boosts. It definitely
> > feels *much* faster on our test instance right now.
> 
> --
> Paul Poulain, Associé-gérant / co-owner
> BibLibre, Services en logiciels libres pour les bibliothèques BibLibre, Open
> Source software and services for libraries
> 
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