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by hnlmorg 655 days ago
The bottleneck for most CGI requests wasn’t the language, it was the fork()ing for each request.

Granted there will be some CPU intensive services that will benefit from C but I still wouldn’t call CGI “pretty fast”.

That’s not to say I’d dislike CGI. I made a fair amount of money in my early career based on services written to use CGI. But the reasons why we had things like fastcgi, mod_perl, and the HTTP servers included in language frameworks was to mitigate the overhead of expensive process forking.

1 comments

Interesting, I've never found fork particularly expensive, usually the bottleneck turned out to be setting up language specific runtimes. I would certainly never write CGI in a language like python where startup takes significant time.
Yeah, that’s true too.