Serving 200M requests per day with a CGI-bin

10 months ago

CGI programs were widely used in the early 2000s for dynamic websites, primarily written in Perl or C.
CGI works by spawning a new process per request, with request data passed via environment variables and stdin, and responses written to stdout.
CGI programs exit after handling a request, ensuring resources are freed, making them reliable despite potentially poor code quality.
Deployment was simple, involving copying the CGI program to the cgi-bin directory on the web server.
Early web servers had limited resources (1-2 CPUs, 1-4GB RAM), making them vulnerable to traffic spikes (e.g., Slashdot effect).
Modern hardware (e.g., 16+ CPU threads) can handle CGI efficiently, with benchmarks showing 2400+ requests per second possible.
A guestbook CGI program was written in Go using SQLite, demonstrating simplicity and performance on modern systems.
Benchmark results showed CGI performing well under both Apache and a custom Go net/http server, with high RPS (requests per second).

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