Speeding up my website(s) with mod_perl / 2016-11-03

I am currently working on a new version of one of the sites I manage in perl, rewriting it from php. I noticed loading times were slower and gave mod_perl a try.

The basic configuration of mod_perl is quite simple. This did not give me the big advantage in web server speed, that came when I added:

PerlModule Apache::DBI

to the apache2 config. The Apache::DBI module caches database connections for supported drivers, this speeds up database-dependent scripts. The module comes from the ubuntu package libapache-dbi-perl and Apache will throw really bad errors at you when the module you want to load is not available.

This is now enabled for my homepage site too. The processing times of the pages don't change much, but the startup of the perl interpreter, modules and scripts is much faster so the waiting time is a lot less.