New upcoming forum software.. need feedback

Hi,

Me and an associate recently developed - URL ... Its coded in regular perl, and uses variouse eval functions to get desired source files. Im looking for opinions on what to charge, what to improve, what to add, pretty much anything. We'd like to eventually code it in oop, but i am very limited in that field. So if you'd like to help with that email me.

All the best,
URL


P.s. great board you have here!

It looks great!

Do you think perl might not be the best choice for a forum? You're really going to be processor bound with this thing, and run into speed problems under light-to-medium loads, unless your users are running it under mod_perl.

If it's an instructive exercise, bravo! It looks very functional as a BB goes. You obviously put a lot of thought and hard work into it. For smaller BBs it'll kick ***.

Are you coding it to work with mod_perl? That will help really bring the thing to the top in terms of speed, though I think speed concious users will lean toward PHP in most cases, unless they are very perl savvy and have a dedicated server (usually the only way you can get mod_perl)

Feel free to drop me a line if you want to talk about mod_perl or OOP and I'll share what has helped me. . .

Thanks!

I have been thinking a lot about making it mySQL backend. That would eliminate any speed issue. It is coded quite uniquly as far as forum scripts go, and i definatly perfer perl over php simply because perl is less limited and runs around the same speed. Its a stereotype that php is faster as it is usually incorperated with a mySQL db. Anyway ill be sure to contact you about OOP as id really like to begin coding that way.

All the best,
threesixsty

I hate to burst your bubble, but PHP is far faster than *interpreted* perl for equivalent actions. Putting a mySQL backend is only going to go so far with interpreted perl. mySQL will speed up anything that takes disk access in the system you've currently made, but not other operations.

If you're talking mod_perl, which is perl that gets intrepreted once and then embedded in the httpd binary, then you're talking near equivalent speeds for perl and PHP. The reason for the difference? With interpreted perl, the script gets loaded, parsed, and made into bytecode for every single access. 10,000 hits with intpreted perl? That means your script has been loaded, parsed, compiled, and then discarded from memory 10,000 times. This is obviously not an efficient way to do things.

Fortunately, with mod_perl, this happens only once per httpd child for the entire life of the child, meaning that every request after that comes directly out of the apache httpd binary. This will give you huge speed increases, potentially more than 1000 %! A child could serve hundreds of requests before dieing.

PHP, when built as a linked module for apache, like it usually is, does something similar to mod_perl, hence the reason that PHP is faster than interpreted perl.

All this comes from someone who does absolutely everything in perl (and mySQL or postgresql), for precisely the reason you stated below: Perl can do anything.

Some benchmarks I've run for an equivalent script that uses mySQL:

Interpreted perl- 10/11 pages per second
mod_perl- 140 to 160 pages per second(!)
PHP- 180 pages per second.

Do the tests yourself! If you've got a linux box, the thing you want to use is ab, apache benchmark.

So PHP is far faster than interpreted perl, and slightly faster (in this case) than mod_perl. This makes me use mod_perl, simply because perl is a full-fledged language, and PHP is a special purpose language made for web scripting only.