On Linux and average modperl apache process has a memory footprint of 2-5MB. A trivial Perl process has a memory footprint of 5MB++. A typical functional Perl daemon will consume 10MB without worries and often 20MB. Explain how this is more efficient? Have a look with top as YMMV.

Ok, here is a little test prog with HTTP::Daemon it has a smaller memfootprint than any of my apache servers and serves about 800 requests/sec for a "hello world" example. Here is the output of ab followed by the script for your tests at home.

~/httpd/bin/ab -c 10 -n 500 http://peggy:9876/hello
This is ApacheBench, Version 1.3d <$Revision: 1.69 $> apache-1.3
Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustec
+h.net/
Copyright (c) 1998-2002 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apa
+che.org/

Benchmarking peggy (be patient)
Completed 100 requests
Completed 200 requests
Completed 300 requests
Completed 400 requests
Finished 500 requests
Server Software:        libwww-perl-daemon/1.26
Server Hostname:        peggy
Server Port:            9876

Document Path:          /hello
Document Length:        12 bytes

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   0.621 seconds
Complete requests:      500
Failed requests:        0
Broken pipe errors:     0
Total transferred:      73500 bytes
HTML transferred:       6000 bytes
Requests per second:    805.15 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       12.42 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       1.24 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent request
+s)
Transfer rate:          118.36 [Kbytes/sec] received
[download]

#!/usr/bin/perl
use bytes;
use HTTP::Daemon;
use HTTP::Status;
$SIG{PIPE} = 'IGNORE';

my $res = HTTP::Response->new(RC_OK);
$res->content("Hello World\n");
$res->content_type('text/plain');

$|++;
my $d = HTTP::Daemon->new( LocalPort => 9876, ReuseAddr => 1 ) || die;
print "Please contact me at: <URL:", $d->url, ">\n";

for ( 1 .. 20 ) {

  my $pid = fork;
  next if $pid;
  next unless defined $pid;
  do {
    flock $d, 2;
    my $c = $d->accept;
    flock $d, 8;
    my $oldfh = select($c);
    $|++;
    select($oldfh);

    while ( my $r = $c->get_request ) {

      if ( $r->method eq 'GET' ) { #and $r->url->path eq "/hello" ) {
        $c->send_response($res);
      }
      else {
        $c->send_error(RC_FORBIDDEN);
      }
    }
    $c->close;
    undef($c);

  } while (1);
  exit 0;
}
while (1) { waitpid( -1, 0 ) }
[download]

Boris

On Linux and average modperl apache process has a memory footprint of 2-5MB

I am not sure what you mean by "average," but I've found mine will range anywhere between 10MB and 30MB (this is for rather involved apps for bioinformatics).

I've often seen 12-17MB cited as the expected range for "typical" webapps.

Sorry I was referring to the C based httpd part not the Perl side. As noted a trivial perl script is 4-5MB and this is addidtive to the base. I have seen the same figures as you.

cheers

tachyon

Maybe less efficient in memory foot print, but possibly more efficient in time for implementation and maintenance. :)

Play that funky music white boy..

One of our apps needed a little web server on the desktop, so for that we used HTTP::Daemon. This allows us to deploy a simple, more portable configuration to a large number of users. It's multiplatform, also.

The biggest difficulty with Apache is the learning curve for doing complicated things. Apache tries to make simple things simple. Like just about everything else, it's not quite as good as perl in this regard.

Apache has a modular architecture and can be built for low resource usage. 750K for an httpd process is not unusual. For CPU usage apache should be much lower.