CGI is slow because of the spin up time for individual processes for each request. FastCGI is fast because they run as one long running process that handles mu

CGI is slow because of the spin up time for individual processes for each request. FastCGI is fast because they run as one long running process that handles multiple requests. While plain CGI is a slower, the advantage is that you don't have long running and potentially idle processes for low traffic periods, and process isolation is a little security boost. I chose to have a slightly slower startup time, which hopefully remain constant in a load balanced cluster, to gain the advantages above.