Jeff Baker <jeff (at) GODZILLA.TAMU.EDU> exclaimed:

• Date: Tue, 3 Mar 1998 21:13:06 -0600

  I'd like to share my recent success story.  Over the last four days,
  students living on campus here at Texas A&M University have had to go
  through what is called "contract renewal," where they indicate whether
  or not they will continue to live on campus in the coming academic
  year.  In the past, this has all been done very tedioulsy with
  scantron forms and human-eye error correction.  This year, the system
  was moved to the web.  The code was user-proofed to prevent the usual
  mistakes, with the addition of some fancy authentication and session
  tracking mechanisms. 
  
  The system was originally written using ActiveWare PerlScript on IIS
  4.0, but when I was done, it was glaringly obvious that it was far too
  slow.  In only 14 days, we ported the code to Apache and mod_perl,
  with the same NT platform underneath.  The performance
  (transactions/sec) was more than 60 times better!!!
  
  The system went online Friday night, and in the course of its 4-day run,
  it served 400,000 documents, the bulk of which were generated on the
  fly. Ten thousand people used the system, and all went without a hitch.
  
  Here's to mod_perl!
  Jeffrey