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Re: usefulness of scsh for web CGIs

To: scsh@martigny.ai.mit.edu
Subject: Re: usefulness of scsh for web CGIs
From: shivers@ai.mit.edu (Olin Shivers)
Date: 21 May 1996 01:08:15 -0400
Organization: Artificial Intelligence Lab, MIT
Reply-to: shivers@ai.mit.edu
Michael's suggestion is a good one. I would add a few comments.

   From: Michel Schinz <schinz@studi.epfl.ch>
   Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme.scsh
   Date: 20 May 1996 16:29:01 +0200

   As I said in my previous post, a solution is to use the SU httpd
   server. It is a full http server written on top of scsh. This means
   that you can easily load the code for the scripts in the server, and
   then invoke it with a standard procedure call. If you do this, scsh is
   only loaded once at the server startup, so the startup time is
   completely eliminated for the scripts. Of course, you can only do that
   if you can replace the http server you are using, and there are
   drawbacks: For example, if your script dies abruptly (e.g. with a core
   dump), the whole server dies, which is not the case with the CGI
   interface;

Not necessarily. The httpd process can fork the handler. This just uses
Unix fork() to replicate the process, so there's no vm heap-load overhead.

   also, the scripts and the server share a common "working
   space" (same global variables, etc.).

Again, if you fork the handler, the handler can muck about as it pleases
without affecting the parent server process. Also, S48's package system
means you can separate the "working spaces" using software modules,
even though they will all run in the same address space.
        -Olin

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