[Templates] CGI/TT vs SSI

[Perrin Harkins]

On Fri, 2003-10-10 at 13:15, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
> So unless you *need* minute-by-minute dynamic generation of
> your site, you win by using a build-time process to produce pages
> which are then served statically.

I think you could make an actual formula for calculating this. 
Basically, static generation is a win until the amount of time it takes
to generate the whole site becomes larger than the amount of time in
which the data changes.  Then you have to look for alternatives.

We had this situation at eToys, when it started taking hours to generate
the hundreds of thousands of pages on the site and we needed them to
update within an hour or so.  We were already pushing our luck by using
SSI (thorugh mod_perl of course) in the generated pages for
up-to-the-minute stock level data, so finally we changed our approach to
generating pages on demand and then caching them.  This worked great for
us, since only a small percentage of our pages were actually viewed in
any given hour.  So, the other factor is knowing what percentage of
pages get viewed.

- Perrin