Figure 1-2. The FastCGI life cycle Although FastCGI
Figure 1-2. The FastCGI life cycle Although FastCGI is a step in the right direction, it still has a problem with process proliferation: there is at least one process for each FastCGI program. If a FastCGI program is to handle concurrent requests, it needs a pool of processes, one per request. Considering that each process may be executing a Perl interpreter, this approach does not scale as well as you might hope. (Although, to its credit, FastCGI can distribute its processes across multiple servers.) Another problem with FastCGI is that it does nothing to help the FastCGI program more closely interact with the server. As of this writing, the FastCGI approach has not been implemented by some of the more popular servers, including Microsoft’s Internet Information Server. Finally, FastCGI programs are only as portable as the language in which they’re written. For more information on FastCGI, see http://www.fastcgi.com/. mod_perl If you are using the Apache web server, another option for improving CGI performance is using mod_perl. mod_perl is a module for the Apache server that embeds a copy of the Perl interpreter into the Apache httpd executable, providing complete access to Perl functionality within Apache. The effect is that your CGI scripts are precompiled by the server and executed without forking, thus running much more quickly and efficiently. For more information on mod_perl, see http://perl.apache.org/. PerlEx PerlEx, developed by ActiveState, improves the performance of CGI scripts written in Perl that run on Windows NT web servers (Microsoft’s Internet Information Server, O’Reilly’s WebSite Professional, and Netscape’s FastTrack Server and Enterprise Server). PerlEx uses the web server’s native API to achieve its performance gains. For more information, see http://www.activestate.com/plex/. Other Solutions CGI/Perl has the advantage of being a more-or-less platform-independent way to produce dynamic web content. Other well-known technologies for creating web applications, such as ASP and server-side JavaScript, are proprietary solutions that work only with certain web servers. Server Extension APIs Several companies have created proprietary server extension APIs for their web servers. For example, Netscape provides an internal API called NSAPI (now becoming WAI) and Microsoft provides ISAPI. Using one of these APIs, you can write server extensions that enhance or change the base functionality of the server, allowing the server to handle tasks that were once relegated to external CGI programs. As you can see in Figure 1 3, server extensions exist within the main process of a web server.
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