It was an answer to a question that turned into a conversation which I found interesting.

The main point made that I found interesting is that multiple physical layers are generally not a good idea for performance reasons in a web environment. A batch processing environment is a different kettle of fish. Your point about it being desirable to separate out different political groups is also good. But scalability is not a good way to go about it.

Another interesting post in the same discussion is [link|http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=301187|http://www.perlmonks...pl?node_id=301187].

Cheers,
Ben

PS A note on your idea about moving static content into the webserver. This is fairly easy to do if Apache is your app server. See [link|http://perl.apache.org/docs/1.0/guide/strategy.html|http://perl.apache.o...ide/strategy.html] for some mod_perl configurations where you have separated the two. I have seen it done well with a make that generated the configuration files for multiple webservers from one static file (the idea being to make what is done dynamically with mod_perl in one match what is done statically in the next non-mod_perl enabled server). I see no reason why these strategies should be Perl-specific...