Brown trousers time :~

[Lyle - CosmicPerl.com]

Hi All,
 Soon I'll be embarking on the largest project I've ever undertaken. 
It's going to be 10's of thousands of lines of code. It needs to be 
perfect (or damn close :))

I've been doing a LOT of reading though my blue shelves of O'Reilly... 
As well as hitting a lot of different forums and lists and working my 
google-fu...

Part's of the software need to be able to withstand large volumes of 
traffic... I'm talking about 100's, 1000's or even 10,000's of clicks 
per second!

This all has me thoroughly bricking it :~

 From what I've learned it'll have to be mod_perl handling the heavily 
traffic parts of the software. Basically CGI scripts that open a 
database connection, read data, then write data and redirect the browser.

 From all my searching I have a few questions yet unanswered, I'm hoping 
you guys can help...

I'm concerned that I'll have to quickly write some C libraries for the 
heavy traffic parts, the book I've found referenced most is "Embedding 
and Extending Perl", is this the best book to get? Or do you guys 
recommend others? Or do you recommend other books to get along with this 
one?

What's the mod_perl equivalent in Win32? I'm guessing PerlScript in ASP, 
but is that faster? I can't find any benchmarks.

Would it be best to have separate databases (all in MySQL) for different 
parts of the program? So that the database tables that are heavily 
accessed are totally separate from those that aren't.

Anybody got some spare underpants? (preferably not white ones)

I want everything to be as realtime as possible. But this would mean 
updating several tables for each of those hits, I get the nasty feeling 
that will be too slow. So would it probably be better to have a cron job 
updating some tables, every 10 minutes or so, and keep the heavily 
updating to a single table?

I think I'm up to speed (for now at least) with everything else.


Lyle

P.S. AAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH