[Xitami] RE:Perl scripts in Windows (Andrew Morris)

[Boyan Brezinsky]

When I was playing with Bugzilla 2.12, I found the same slowness of perl. I 
couldn't figure out why, I only found the symptoms. Bugzilla is a 
bug-tracking system written in Perl. In version 2.12, there was a script 
that was finding the differences between bug reports - using diff. The 
operation flow was xitami->perl.script1->perl.script2->diff
IIRC, every time xitami called perl, cmd.exe was invoked. In this manner of 
operation the call to diff took 30 seconds to complete, although the 
program itself was ready almost instantly. When I would execute the same 
script (script1) directly from the command line, it completed in the usual 
fast way.
I couldn't resolve this, but thankfully it was done by others - in the 
following versions of Bugzilla diff was dropped, so now it runs just fine 
in the rare occasions that somebody uses it.
System:
Xitami 2.4d9, NT service
Perl ActiveState 5.6.1 - 628
Windows 2000 SP2
128 MB RAM
MySQL 3.23.39 or something like that
diff - from the Cygnus library - ver. 2.7
IE 5.0

So I'd suggest examining which is the component that causes the slowdown. I 
think that 30 seconds was the default timeout of Xitami for processes that 
it perceives as hung. As to why it wouldn't detect the completion of diff, 
or whatever the reason was (I never found it out, as I said) - I don't have 
the slightest idea.
What I did was to turn on the security auditing to find out when each 
process starts and stops, and to turn on the cgi debugging in xitami, so I 
can see when the files were generated.
Maybe in your case it is something to do with paths and exit codes? E.g. if 
a process is called in such a way that it needs to be found via the PATH 
environment variable, its exit code is not correctly passed back? This is 
as wild a guess as it can get, but with all this software you never know.
Best regards,
Boyan

Andrew Morris wrote:

> Has anybody found that Perl scripts run intolerably slow on Windows 98/NT
> with Xitami? I'm using ActivePerl 623 and the problem doesn't appear to 
be
> specific to the machine or the installation. Even a small test Perl 
script
> (e.g 'hello world') type stuff takes up to _30 seconds_ to appear in the
> browser. I'm only running this on a local-loop. Does the problem go away
> when you're calling the server from a remote computer?
> Any info or insights appreciated.
> Andy
>
> --