Re:I recommend CGI instead of web frameworks
by pjc50 on Sunday August 22, 2021 @03:31PM
(#28268704)
The problem has got worse rather than better; the machines are approximately 1 million times more capable in terms of raw MIPS, but the runtime startup cost of the languages used has increased, so the wall clock time to start a request has gone up.
2000 era CGI tended to be in Perl or PHP. Even then Java made an appearance, with a long-lived host process, e.g. Websphere.
One advantage which the author gets right is that CGI consumes no resources while not serving requests, so you can have a lot of different CGI programs on the same machine. It also plays nicely with multi-user systems, so an ISP could host a lot of different customers on one box. We could serve CGIs from several hundred users off a 128MB Pentium system, for significantly less resources than one Slack instance.
2000 era CGI tended to be in Perl or PHP. Even then Java made an appearance, with a long-lived host process, e.g. Websphere.
One advantage which the author gets right is that CGI consumes no resources while not serving requests, so you can have a lot of different CGI programs on the same machine. It also plays nicely with multi-user systems, so an ISP could host a lot of different customers on one box. We could serve CGIs from several hundred users off a 128MB Pentium system, for significantly less resources than one Slack instance.