Re: Web service HTTP Basic Authentication - where to start from?

I've been reviewing Jay's product, which includes a generic CGI program
that calls other RPG programs based on a "routing" table. By saying table,
I'm referring to an IBM i DB table that developers may use to define routes.

Part of my review includes performance testing of the
GET_CUSTOMER_BANK_ACCOUNT_INFO sample web service that's included with the
product. On my server that request consumes 5 milliseconds of CPU time
within HTTP server Jobs.

I compared it to an HTTP interface that I wrote. I tested a web application
that performs comparable database I/O and generates a comparable output
stream. Under the covers it parses HTTP input (environment variables,
query-string parameters, HTTP headers, cookies, and HTML form variables).
The result of the parsing is various structured sets of NAME-VALUE pairs
that can be retrieved by name.

That interface consumes only .6 milliseconds of CPU time. That's about an
8X performance improvement. I've been trying to account for the performance
difference. Jay's CGI program uses YAJL under the covers for CGI I/O. His
HTTP server is also performing basic authentication on every request. But I
didn't expect to see that big of a performance difference.

Nathan.