Chapter 9. The Power of Persistence

CHAPTER 8, “PERFORMANCE MYTHS,” COVERED THE ASPECTS of Web applications that won’t help the performance of a CGI application, but it begs this question: “Where can Perl performance be improved on a Web server?” The answer is simple: Don’t exit. Another word for this idea is “persistence;” a persistent program is one that hangs around as long as it’s needed without having to restart. Each new request to a persistent program is handled as part of a continuous stream instead of in fits and starts.