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2025-07-07 18:58:30.993505+02 by Dan Lyke 0 comments

two and a half decades ago, I was part of a team writing a "web scale" distributed database that was going to handle a staggering single digit number number of millions of requests per day (tens of requests per second). Over the years, I've wondered about all of these web frameworks that integrate a server into the web application, that make some data persistence issues easier, but require a sh*load of RAM and complexity in configuring reverse proxies and all sorts of other stuff.

So when I recently looked at my logs and discovered that, on my couple of euros a month cheap host, serving pages from PostgreSQL via Perl invoked with FastCGI, a single IP address was getting served 30 pages a second, and that the site was serving a hell of a lot more than that, I kinda had some of my "meh, web apps don't need to be that complex" vibes confirmed

Anyway: Serving 200 million requests per day with a cgi-bin.

Stop over-engineering shit that doesn't need to be overengineered.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Writing Databases hubris ]

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