There has been some recent confusion about how much memory you need in a web server to handle a huge number of concurrent requests. I also made a performance claim on the STS list that got me an unusual number of private emails.
Here’s how you run a highly concurrent website on a shoe-string budget:
The first thing you’ll do is get a Linode server because they have the fastest CPU and disk.
Install Apache with your web application running under mod_php, mod_perl …

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In any company if you save $1 it goes straight to your bottom line. Meaning it’s as if you just earned another $1. The company that my wife and I have been running for about 2 years now serves over 30 Million page requests per day. We’ve invested a lot of time in getting more performance out of our hardware but about 6 months ago we started hitting pesky issues like limits on the speed of light and electrons.
So we’ve …

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I have this module that a great group of guys in Malaysia have put together. But their language of choice is PHP and mine is Perl. I need to modify it slightly to integrate it. For example, I need to add my own session code so that their code knows if my user is logged in or not and who they are.
I started writing PHP but quickly started duplicating code I’d already written in Perl. Fetch the session from the …

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