They are indeed on NT and the NT machines are what keep failing, despite
the rather heinous FUD being spread around by EBay and M$ that the U10ks
have problems.
> Still, I'm curious; yours is the first suggestion I've seen in a while
> that straight CGI is a particularly fast way of running a heavily
> database-backed site like ebay, on any hardware. Could you elaborate?
> I'm particularly interested in how you handle connections to the
> database in this kind of environment; persistent database connections
> are usually reckoned to be a real advantage of mod_perl-type solutions
> (or, say, FastCGI, Java servlet engines, etc.) over straight,
> fork-and-exec CGI scripts.
>
You get sneaky about it: put a database proxy in place that maintains
persistent connections to the database and just funnels queries and responses
back and forth. I've only used this as a way to avoid rewriting CGI,
not as a preferred method for creating fast web to database systems.
> (The usual argument along these lines is spelled out in
>
> http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/server-programming.html
>
> in Phil Greenspun's usual pungent style... it's toward the middle of
> the chapter, under the heading "Step 3: Choose a program invocation
> mechanism").
>
> rst
-- --b