Phillip Pearson - web + electronics notes

tech notes and web hackery from a new zealander who was vaguely useful on the web back in 2002 (see: python community server, the blogging ecosystem, the new zealand coffee review, the internet topic exchange).

2003-9-24

Conservation of pain

In every software project, there is a certain amount of pain to be experienced. Some of it by the developers, some of it by the users. If the developers feel more of it, the users feel less ...

For example: write your web application as a CGI in C++. It runs fast and installs easily (without root perms if you have AllowOverride All, without restarting daemons). But the pain level of development is pretty high.

A related observation: CGI apps don't necessarily have to be slow. What makes them slow is the overhead of an interpreter starting up, compiling a script, and shutting down. Write them in compiled languages and they scream along. For example, my Apache here does 200 hits/second on a straight HTML file, and 170 hits/second on a C++ CGI.
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