On Wed, Aug 27, 2003 at 01:04:55PM -0500, Alex Malinovich wrote: > > You should keep in mind that a lot of the overhead involved with Perl > comes from having to load the interpreter. In the case of webservers, > you can get tremendous results by constantly keeping the interpreter > loaded and just forking off processes.
Right, as with spamassassin vs. spamc/spamd. However, in the case of the foomatic + cjet printer driver taking minutes whereas cups's own HP driver is respectably fast, it's clearly execution overhead slowing it down. > The plain-text nature of Perl is also one of the things that makes it so > portable. There are of course other solutions. Java, for example, uses > compiled bytecode. But the speed gains here are negligible. The primary > reason for it is so people can hide their source from the rest of the > world. > > There are Perl compilers out there, but they're not widely used. Any > potential speed increase is on par with just keeping the interpreter > loaded. And it's also important to remember what Perl is intended for. > Remember the "extraction and report" part. Perl isn't designed for you > to run 3d rendering (though it probably could :). It's designed to > create reports. A task where it can be argued that the speed at which a > program can be written is more important than the speed at which it > executes. Well, in the above example it is doing 2d rendering, at least... Maybe I ought to try and recode the printer driver in C. -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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