ModPerl may not be the only solution to speed up TWiki, here are the alternative solutions:

• PersistentPerl, a very nice solution as it allows for multiple concurrent instances, and can be installed without root or admin priviledges.
  • PersistentPerl used to be called SpeedyCGI
• FastCGI, a general solution to speed up all CGI scripts, but may require some work to adapt TWiki to it
• PerlEx (Windows only, not OpenSource)

Links:

• A nice summary of the different alternatives in general:
  PDF: http://www.extropia.com/presentations/mod_perl_app_bridging.html (HTML version)

Feedback:

• ColasNahaboo: I have been using mod_perl in production environments for 2 years, but I am beginning to use SpeedyCGI, to provide "farms of TWikis" on the same apache server via Virtual Hosting. - 09 Aug 2003

-- ColasNahaboo - 09 Aug 2003

Some numbers, generated using a standard performance benchmark checking into 'tools'.

view numbers are the average of ~1000 requests with 3 concurrent users. Requests were made to all the pages in the TWiki web i.e. all plugins pages were hit. edit and save numbers are the averages of 10 runs of each with 3 concurrent users. Most plugins were installed.

	Requests per second			Normalised performance index
	view	edit	save
Vanilla	0.88	0.95	1.03	1.00
SpeedyCGI without mod_speedycgi	2.27	1.91	0.79	1.74
SpeedyCGI with mod_speedycgi	2.38	3.14	3.47	3.14
mod_perl	2.45	3.20	3.52	3.21

Note that mod_perl numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt, as I don't think mod_perl works very reliably with TWiki. SpeedyCGI, on the other hand, seems pretty robust (despite misgivings about global variables!)

-- CrawfordCurrie - 16 Jun 2004