[Gambas-user] WebPage support in Gambas

[Rob Kudla]

On 03/18/2012 01:09 PM, John Spikowski wrote:
> What is the overhead of using Gambas as a CGI scripting engine? 

We've been running Gambas 1.99 as a CGI scripting engine on the
gambasdoc.org host for about 5 years now. Benoit wrote the entire Gambas
wiki in Gambas.  Like other CGI languages (perl, ruby, some use cases of
php, etc.) the overhead is that the interpreter needs to start for every
page load. But you saw in my previous post how small that is. We don't
have X installed on that server, so the only Gambas component installed
is gb.db.mysql.

If anything, Gambas CGI seems to be a little faster than perl CGI,
probably because perl compiles its programs at runtime. php may be a
little faster because of mod_php, and I've used mod_perl to reduce
perl's overhead, but that introduces compatibility issues that can be
irritating if you don't remember that you have it enabled.

Last I checked, the Gambas CGIs running gambasdoc.org were serving about
25GB per month without any problems, and no one has complained about the
site's responsiveness. We had a bit of a load crunch around the release
of Gambas 3, so gambasdoc.org has its own dedicated machine now that
should be in production soon.

I don't use Gambas for my own web projects, to be honest, because I
pretty much dream in perl and am used to its modules for things like
encryption, JSON, etc. as well as its regex syntax. But Gambas is pretty
efficient as CGI languages go.

Rob