Generating dynamic content at database-backed web servers: cgi-bin vs. mod_perl

Authors:
Alexandros Labrinidis;Nick Roussopoulos
Affiliations:
Department of Computer Science and Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park, MD;Department of Computer Science and Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Venue:
ACM SIGMOD Record
Year:
2000

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Abstract

Web servers are increasingly being used to deliver dynamic content rather than static HTML pages. In order to generate web pages dynamically, servers need to execute a script, which typically connects to a DBMS. Although CGI was the first approach at server side scripting, it has significant performance shortcomings. Currently, there are many alternative server side scripting architectures which offer better performance than CGI. In this paper, we report our experiences using mod_perl, an Apache Server module, which can improve the performance of CGI scripts by at least an order of magnitude. Except for presenting results from our experiments, we also briefly describe the implementation of an industrial strength database-backed web site that we recently built and give a quick overview of the various server-side scripting mechanisms.