Tonight's update eliminates a major bottleneck in generation of Members website pages. This site's CGI is written in perl, employing a powerful object-oriented framework architected by Deadron. Each time a page is generated, a new perl instance must load all of these modules and compile the code before it can begin executing. That's a lot of redundant processing and disk accesses for every page view.

FastCGI solves our problem by keeping the perl instance running, servicing new CGI requests from the same process. That means no more perl startup overhead per page. My tests show that under normal circumstances, this can save an average of 500-600% off running time per page view. Pretty snappy! You may not notice the speed increase normally, but it should help tremendously during peak load times.

Since FastCGI changes the way the script operates in certain fundamental ways, there's always the outside chance that something funny might happen. We've tested pretty thoroughly, but please report any unexpected results - just report the url you accessed and a screenshot of what you got.

In other speed-related news, BYOND 3.5 Beta 5 is already helping to reduce our server's load as worlds report their status directly to the hub. Combined with recent hub optimizations made last week, this eliminates a substantial number of redundant location reports. We've already measured a noticeable improvement in hub response time this past week, as compared with the week before it. Huzzah!