[ammmir]

FastCGI was one of my favorite silver bullets for improving the speed of /cgi-bin/ programs. I used to have slow machines where the Perl interpreter startup time would be significant, so rewriting the script around an fcgi loop made a huge difference. The script could stick around serving requests, and if you feared a memory leak, you could just exit() after a hundred requests or whatever, and the FastCGI spawner would restart them on the next request.

It wasn't as fast as something like mod_perl [1], but much easier to integrate with quickly hacked scripts, as long as you were lexically scoping everything with my() and not screwing up your globals. Fun times.

[1] https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=108008