ModPerl & Apache related stuff
To reach a broader audience this stuff is in English. Native speakers, please bear with me. This is not my mother tongue.
Measuring memory consumption
19.12.2010
When working with mod_perl, mod_php or other script languages embedded in the Apache httpd the memory
consumption of the whole has to be paid attention. Every now and then people complain on various mailing lists
and forums about their WEB server that works for hours, days or weeks and then suddenly becomes unaccessible.
Even SSH or login on a console times out or takes almost forever. After a httpd restart everything
works as usual again. These are the symptoms one encounter if the httpd working set does not fit into the
available RAM.
The basic ideas of this article are quite old. I have done similar measurements in 2004 or even earlier. Nevertheless, I think they are worth to be written down.
How to hand long-running requests over to another process
19.04.2010
Modperl worker processes are usually an expensive resource. Hence, locking up such a thing for a long time is undesirable. So, perhaps it's possible to free the apache worker before the request is actually done and handing the client connection over to another more light-weight process?
This is a follow-up to the server-push clock below.
Bucket brigade based IO in a PerlResponseHandler
18.03.2010
This article shows how to work around a memory leak in $r->print based IO for
really large response bodies.
How to deploy mod_proxy as WWW user agent?
15.03.2010
Have you ever asked if it is possible to use mod_proxy in a mod_perl handler to fetch the content of a remote URL? This article explain how to do that.
How to send a custom content type along with a custom response?
14.03.2010
One can set the text sent to the browser in case the request ends in a HTTP error via ErrorDocument
or in Perl via $r->custom_response($code, $message). But if I need a special
Content-Type header to be passed along, how do I do that? This article explains it.
How to have Apache::Test generate SSL certificates?
13.03.2010
Apache::Test can generate SSL certificates to be used in tests.
This article explains how.
How to pass control from an output filter to an ErrorDocument
28.02.2010
A Perl*Handler can normally trigger HTTP error messages like 404 Not Found by simply
returning something other than Apache2::Const::OK or Apache2::Const::DECLINED.
But there is an exception. Filter handlers can only trigger Apache2::Const::SERVER_ERROR this way.
This article explains why and how to circumvent that limitation.