Introduction to FastCGI

FastCGI is a high-performance API supported by the Zeus Web Server. It is an open standard, and is language and platform independent. FastCGI provides both authorization and content generation services, and has a simple, quick development cycle. FastCGI is recommended as a general purpose solution for almost any task.

FastCGI attempts to mitigate the performance problems of CGI by eliminating the need to fork() the CGI script on each CGI request. It implements a framework for a persistent CGI runner process - in effect, the CGI script becomes a function call rather than a standalone binary.

FastCGI is an open (non-proprietary) web server interface. It is supported natively by the Zeus Web Servers.

FastCGI applications can act as 'authorizers' (eg for access control) as well as the typical CGI 'responder' mode. The applications can be distributed over a network, running on a different machine than the web server itself, which in certain circumstances can bring security or licensing benefits.

A good starting point for getting to grips with FastCGI is the programmer's guide to writing FastCGI: http://www.fastcgi.com/devkit/doc/fastcgi-prog-guide/ap_guide.htm .

Advantages

• Simple
• Easy to migrate CGI applications to FastCGI
• High performance
• Stable
• Distributed scalability. FastCGI applications can run on a different machine to the webserver, and sit being a load-balancer to scale over an aplication server farm
• Can be written in any language, e.g. Perl
• The application can use any process model (single threaded, pre-fork, multi-threaded etc)
• Best general purpose high performance content generation and authorization API.

Disadvantages

• API restricted to content generation and authorization. Cannot be used for more low-level server behaviour modification, such as rewriting incoming URLs.

Content Manager [Administrator] 16 December 2005