* 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
