Re: CGI, semicolons, and so on...

Rob McCool (robm@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Thu, 30 Dec 1993 14:02:32 -0600


/*
* Re: CGI, semicolons, and so on... by Fisher Mark (FisherM@is3.indy.tce.com)
* written on Dec 30, 8:20am.
*
*
* The opacity or virtualization of the present scheme is nice, as the user of
* the URL does not have to concern her or himself with whether it represents
* a physical file or it is data created on the fly -- he or she just uses it.

I agree.

* As far as the overhead for a single stat() call, I think that it is pretty
* small in the scheme of things. Why even try writing a server in Perl, an
* interpreted language (which I love), if you need to worry about the overhead
* of a single stat() call? Why even write one in C or C++ rather than
* assembler if a single stat call() can make the difference between a server
* with good response time vs. a server with poor response time?
*/

Well, if it was one stat(), you would be right... however, at times it can
get up to five or six. The overhead for this isn't really significant on a
stock filesystem, but over NFS or AFS (especially AFS) it becomes
significant, and in some cases it becomes large enough to become prohibitive.

--Rob