“In this article we will talk about tools that we need to
get armed with before we can start working on the performance of
our service. … In order to improve performance we need
measurement tools. The main tool categories are benchmarking and
code profiling.“
“It’s important to understand that in a major number of the
benchmarking tests that we will execute we will not look at the
absolute result numbers but the relation between the two and more
result sets. The purpose of the benchmarks is to try to show which
coding approach is preferable. You shouldn’t try to compare the
absolute results presented in the articles with those that you get
while running the same benchmarks on your machine, since you won’t
have the exact hardware and software setup anyway. This kind of
comparison would be misleading. If you compare the relative results
from the tests running on your machine, you will do the right
thing.”
“How much faster is mod_perl than mod_cgi (aka plain perl/CGI)?
There are many ways to benchmark the two. I’ll present a few
examples and numbers below. Check out the benchmark directory of
the mod_perl distribution for more examples.”