URL: http://www.komar.org/cgi-bin/xmas_webcam
Subject: Christmas Lights Webcam
From:       alek@komar.org
Date:       Fri May 27 13:21:18 CDT 2005

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.