July2004Meeting

July Meeting

July 14, 2004 6:30pm at Free Geek, 1741 SE 10th Ave

Notes for this meeting are at

Perlbal, by Brad Fitzpatrick

Brad Fitzpatrick is the founder and fearless leader of LiveJournal.com, an Open Source project and company focused on blogging and social networking with over 3,000,000 accounts, over half of which are in active use. His specialties have come to include Perl, frightening MySQL replication topologies, load balancing, distributed caching, scalability, and high-availability. He dislikes buying unnecessary hardware and commercial software. As such, he finds or creates ways to get more out of hardware, the open source way.

Perlbal

Perlbal's a load-balancing reverse HTTP proxy, as well as a webserver, as well as hybrid combo (useful for serving big files with complex auth/mapping which Perl/PHP is better at). It also has web-based stats. It uses epoll and sendfile to do things incredibly fast which Perl normally sucks at. Everything works in a single thread using an event-based model (hence epoll) and all truly synchronous operations (like the one-time stat and open syscalls before a sendfile) are done in a cloned helper thread which communicates the results back async over a pipe (Linux::AIO module).

Basically it all shows how you can do really fancy low-level stuff in Perl and still be fast.