alek (at) komar.org exclaimed:

• Date: Fri May 27 13:21:18 CDT 2005

• URL: http://www.komar.org/cgi-bin/xmas_webcam

  Alek Komarnitsky (http://www.komar.org/) used mod_perl for 
  his christmas lights webcam that got worldwide attention as 
  bazillions of surfers not only viewed his thousands of 
  holiday lights, but turned them on and off via the Internet. 
  In 2002 and 2003, he had used regular CGI/Perl, which choked 
  under heavy load such as being Slashdotted. So for 2004, 
  he converted to mod_perl and ApacheBench testing showed a 
  5 fold increase in the number of sustainable connections/second 
  - "why didn't I do this earlier!" While Alek finally had to 
  disclose that it was all a fun little hoax 
  (http://www.komar.org/xmas/hoax/), the use of mod_perl was 
  real and enabled a single 2.4 Xeon running Linux/Apache to 
  continue providing dynamically generated content (complete 
  with images that "appeared" to be changing) despite a ton of
  interest (http://www.komar.org/faq/slashdot-effect/2004-christmas/). 
  While he doesn't know if Santa uses mod_perl, it was 
  certainly helpful in Alek's attempt to provide some 
  christmas cheer (http://www.komar.org/xmas/email_santa/2004-christmas/) 
  to people around the world.