Best practices for running Perl?

[Mark Aiken]

> Embedded perl in nginx is NOT for general purpose programming.  It
> runs in nginx worker processes and it MUST NOT block

Ah, this is very important to know! Thank you, Maxim!

Mark

On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 1:09 PM, Maxim Dounin <mdounin at mdounin.ru> wrote:
> Hello!
>
> On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 11:46:47AM -0700, Mark Aiken wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> My apologies for the newbie question; I have poked around quite a bit
>> and can't find a definitive answer.
>>
>> I'm planning to use nginx to set up a lightweight server on a slim
>> virtual-slice host where resources are at a premium. The server will
>> mainly just relay data from clients to back-end systems, so I don't
>> need a fancy render layer or persistence model. I'm planning to go
>> with Perl for its stability and light footprint.
>>
>> My question is, what is the current best-practice for running Perl
>> behind nginx? Is the built-in Perl module stable enough to consider
>> using in production or should I stick with a hand-rolled FCGI wrapper?
>
> Embedded perl in nginx is NOT for general purpose programming.  It
> runs in nginx worker processes and it MUST NOT block (or all your
> connections in the same nginx worker will be blocked as well) -
> and this generally means you can't use DBI, anything that resolves
> hostnames and so on.
>
> It was designed to do small things that can't be easily done with
> nginx itself - e.g. map some variable to another complex one -
> and it does this well enough.  But don't try to use it for general
> purpose web programming.
>
> Use either fastcgi or http backends if you need something general.
>
> Maxim Dounin
>
>> If someone feels that there would be a better slim-language choice
>> that is better supported by nginx instead of Perl, I would appreciate
>> hearing about that as an alternative.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Mark
>>
>
>