[Info-vax] Apache + mod_php performance

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Mon, 30 Sep 2024 20:33:59 -0400, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> But efficiency is a problem. VMS does not do fork. Process creation
> is expensive on VMS. None of that fancy moving descriptors over
> Unix socket stuff.
> 
> VMS got plenty of methods for IPC. A solution with a fixed number
> of processes doing IPC between each other may work fine.
> 
> But the concept of constantly starting new processes and killing
> old processes is not going to perform great.

In other words, VMS still lives in a past world where its kind of 
programming model worked fine, and has never adapted to the era of massive 
parallelism and serving thousands of concurrent client connections.

(I can remember some benchmarks on NFS performance showing our VAX running 
VMS outperforming the Unix machines -- very disconcerting to some Unix 
fans in our Comp Sci department. Those days are long gone.)

VMS is the very definition of a “legacy platform”. Is it worth using for 
new development? Doesn’t seem like it. Is there much point in porting old 
VMS code from Alpha or Itanium to x86? Seems that, technical-debt-wise, 
that is just treading water for a little longer, and prolonging the 
inevitable.