Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 15:16:23 -0700 (PDT)
From: Ellen Elias <elias@ora.com>
To: lwn@eklektix.com
Subject: ActiveState Accelerates Web Sites with PerlEx

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
Vancouver, Canada - May 13, 1998

For Further Information Contact 
Randy Halischuk
Phone (604) 606-4686
RandyH@ActiveState.com
http://www.activestate.com/

ACTIVESTATE ACCELERATES WEB SITES WITH PERLEX

New product improves performance of Perl scripts running on NT Web
servers by up to 30 times.

ActiveState Tool Corp., the industry leader in professional tools for
Perl developers, announces the release of PerlEx, a plug-in for NT Web
servers that significantly improves the performance of Perl scripts by
up to 30 times.  PerlEx runs on NT Web servers from O'Reilly &
Associates, Microsoft and Netscape and executes existing Perl scripts
without modification.

"As the Web has evolved, an increasing number of pages is being served
up dynamically with Perl scripts," says Dick Hardt, CTO of
ActiveState. "Users' expectations are always increasing. Web site
performance is  critical, and the speed in which a page is returned is
an extremely important factor. PerlEx was designed to meet the speed
and performance issue head-on."

Improved Performance
PerlEx improves the speed and performance of Perl  scripts running on
Web servers in three significant ways. First, PerlEx compiles Perl
scripts once and then stores them in memory, so that the scripts  are
not compiled again at each user request. This feature eliminates
compile  time overhead after the first execution of a script. Second,
PerlEx enables persistent database connections so that a new connection
is not required for each user request. This feature significantly
reduces both server load and response time. Third, PerlEx creates
multiple interpreters which can execute scripts simultaneously, thus
increasing Web server performance.

The performance improvements gained by running PerlEx are of twofold
importance. PerlEx significantly reduces the time it takes to return a
page when a user interacts with a Web site, whether it's an Internet,
Intranet or Extranet site. It also allows existing hardware resources
to handle more requests in a given period of time.

Phil Pierotti, Senior Communications Engineer for Quokka Sports Inc.,
San  Francisco, CA, is an early user of PerlEx. "We needed to implement
a  simpler, faster interface on a small mission-critical Java
application, and decided to use Perl to accomplish it. When I
discovered that over 90% of the  application response time was spent
recompiling the script, I decided to try  PerlEx. Immediately I found
that my compilation overhead disappeared and I was  very surprised to
find that the script execution times had shrunk from a typical  300ms
to somewhere between 40 and 70ms. PerlEx reduced my overall execution
time from 1.5 seconds to a single heartbeat!"

Additional Features
PerlEx also extends the functionality of Perl  scripts with a feature
called Solar. Solar allows for the sharing of a single copy of data
between multiple Perl interpreters and for synchronizing access to it.
The product also allows Perl code to be embedded  directly in HTML
files, rather than having HTML embedded in Perl code. This feature is
similar to Active Server Pages, or .asp files on Microsoft Internet
Information Server.

Price
PerlEx sells for $395 US for a single machine license; multiple
machine licenses are available at discounted rates. PerlEx is available
direct from ActiveState at http://www.ActiveState.com/.

About ActiveState
Founded by Dick Hardt, ActiveState Tool Corp. is a  privately-held
corporation with investors that include O'Reilly & Associates.
ActiveState leads the industry in providing professional tools for Perl
developers, and introduced Perl 5 to the Win32 environment. ActiveState
is committed to supporting both the open source and commercial
development communities by contributing a wide range of free binary
run-time products while  providing professional tools for Perl
developers.

About Perl
Short for Practical Extraction and Report Language, Perl is  a
programming language developed by Larry Wall. Because of its strong
text  processing abilities, Perl has become one of the most popular
languages for writing CGI scripts and other Internet applications.
Because Perl is extremely  useful in "gluing" together smaller programs
into larger applications, it has often been referred to as "the duct
tape of the Internet." There are currently over one million developers
worldwide using Perl and this community is continually growing.

ActiveState Professional Tools
PerlEx, ActiveState Perl Debugger, Perl for Win32 and other
professional Perl programming tools are available from the ActiveState
Web site.

Electronic versions of this press release, corporation information and
product descriptions are available at http://www.activestate.com/press/

Perl for Win32, ActiveState Perl Debugger, PerlEx, PerlScript and
Visual Perl are trademarks of ActiveState Tool Corp. All other
trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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