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Serving 200M requests per day with a CGI-bin


Jake Gold tests how well 90s-era CGI works today, using a Go + SQLite CGI program running on a 16-thread AMD 3700X. Using CGI on modest hardware, it’s possible to …

The nascent web community quickly learned that this was a bad idea, and invented technologies like PHP and FastCGI to help avoid that extra overhead and keep code resident in-memory instead. I finally overcame that twenty-year core belief in 2020, when I built datasette-ripgrep, a Datasette plugin that shells out to the lightning fast ripgrep CLI tool (written in Rust) to execute searches. As was pointed out on Hacker News, part of CGI's problem back then was that we were writing web scripts in languages like Perl, Python and Java which had not been designed for lightning fast startup speeds.

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