ActiveState Tool Corp. this week announced the latest release of PerlEx 1.1, the popular Web server plug-in. PerlEx 1.1 is said to dramatically improve performance by pre-compiling Perl scripts and storing them in memory. The plug-in can increase performance from 2 to 30 times by using the Web server’s native Application Programming Interface (API).
PerlEx supports most commercial Windows NT Web servers, including O’Reilly’s WebSite Pro, Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) 3.0 and 4.0, and Netscape FastTrack and Enterprise servers.
The benefits of using PerlEx 1.1 include the ability to handle significantly more user requests than standard Perl CGI can in a given time period. Benchmark tests performed by ActiveState indicate that PerlEx performs up to 30 times faster than Perl CGI, and up to twice as fast as similar products.
By utilizing specific features of PerlEx, a developer can dramatically improve the performance of Web applications. PerlEx 1.1’s Embed functionality allows the user to embed Perl in standard HTML documents, which allows the server-side scripting capabilities similar to Microsoft’s Active Server Pages.
PerlEx is available for $395 from the ActiveState Web site, with upgrades available at no cost for PerlEx 1.0 license holders.