* Stephen Paul Weber <singpol...@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

Reply via email to