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A fast-cgi implementation is something I've looked into if plain CGI is not fast enough. Initially I want to see what exactly the performance comparison is with

• jchw 8y ago
  Oh, I see - so freebsd jails are used for this. At least for process isolation that seems like a solid approach. Still, I do wonder how much of the problem with containers is container overhead. To me a big difference is about what costs can be amortized. With CGI, pretty much every cost is paid at every request. With long running daemons, the per request overhead is removed. With Cloudflare's functions, the scheduling, request, and startup overhead are (theoretically) removed, leaving mostly just execution. With just CGI there's some win since you can drop the scheduling overhead, but I think you would probably lose that advantage as soon as you hit the upper limit where forking per request stops scaling. With FastCGI you can enable better scaling but since you now have to manage long running processes, you are officially in the scheduling business, though you could probably beat container scheduler like Kubernetes in terms of raw overhead. I don't know. Maybe this is a good idea, but I'll admit my first impression was mostly "isn't this just CGI as it always was?"