[josephg]

Environment variables can’t store a TCP connection to a database or a pre rendered HTML string.

In the latter case you could use redis, but that’s a poor, inconvenient, inefficient replacement for a global variable.

[rakoo]

Again, I'm not saying CGI is the fastest but that it is fast enough. Opening a new connection (or better yet, using SQLite), reading a file that contains a prerendered HTML string are fast enough for most use cases