[Templates] CGI/TT vs SSI

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Perrin Harkins <perrin@elem.com> writes:

> 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.

Yes, percentage of possible pages viewed is a factor that doesn't get
thought about often enough; especially for large dynamic sites.  I'd
imagine Advanced Book Exchange, for example, actually shows a very
small proportion of their pages any given day.  Probably the same for
Ebay.  I must have had that idea in the back of my head (even though I
didn't articulate it) since it would never have occurred to me to make
an Ebay-type site out of static pages generated from templates.

I probably wouldn't have tried it for eToys, either, but it sounds
like it served you well for quite a while. 
-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, <dd-b@dd-b.net>, <www.dd-b.net/dd-b/>
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