[jim_lawless]

It's not just the start-up and shut-down costs. A CGI process might need to attain connections to databases or other resources that could be pooled and re-used if the process didn't completely terminate.

You might want to look at using FastCGI:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastCGI

Basically, the CGI processes stay alive and the servers supporting FastCGI ( like Apache and nginx ) communicate with an existing FastCGI process that's waiting for more work, if available.

[harryvederci]

Thanks! That's a good point, about re-using connections.

For my current use-case* that wouldn't be an issue, so CGI could probably be OK there, then!

* A side project that uses SQLite (1 file per user), and no other external resources.