Interesting, I’ve never seen the cgi module used before. It’s good to know it exists.

Here’s an example for those interested: https://dzone.com/articles/python-simple-http-server-with-cg...

Yep, if you want to throw a ghetto GUI onto your python script, easiest way is to run CGIHTTPServer (now renamed in py3), write some 1990's style basic HTML, and point a browser at it. Use for customer facing sites? No. But for your internal status checking script or personal photo tagger, it's low fuss, low dependencies, and completely practical.

It's not forking the process that's a concern, it's what happens next. How slow is Django to start up? Do you want to pay that penalty for every request?

Django as a cgi does sound painful, but that's because it's huge. Most cgi scripts I've written are quite simple. And they rarely have to serve 100s of requests per second. And of course it's possible to optimize the startup time, e.g. by dumping an already-initialized version of the script (even django). Emacs has done that forever. It wouldn't surprise me if there is some way to do it in Python.

I remember reading somewhere that amazon.com was originally implemented as CGI's written in C. And, Perl cgi scripts served the whole web for many years, on servers much slower than what we have now.