Re: [dev] [ANN] CGD - Ultra-minimalist HTTP and FastCGI wrapper for CGI programs.

From: Andreas Krennmair <ak_AT_synflood.at>
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2012 17:06:50 +0200

* Stephen Paul Weber <singpolyma_AT_singpolyma.net> [2012-09-19 17:00]:
>>Still, forking is never the bottleneck
>
>Never? Isn't forking-as-bottleneck most of the reason alternatives to
>CGI exist?

One of the bottlenecks of CGI is that the popular "web scripting" languages
(i.e. PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby) make it horribly inefficient. Every request
doesn't only mean a fork, but also completely loading the application's source
code including all dependencies. I once measured this (because the web hosting
platform that I work on uses CGI + suexec to separate web scripts of different
users on the same host), and every single request to a WordPress makes the PHP
interpreter load more than 1 MB of PHP source. MediaWiki is even worse: I
measured about 4 MB.

For lightweight web apps, consisting of only a single binary or a single script
that is loaded quickly, this obviously isn't a problem.

Regards,
Andreas
Received on Wed Sep 19 2012 - 17:06:50 CEST