"premature optimisation is the root of all evil" for sure, but getting a denial of service by the Google bot scanning your website, someone running Apache Bench

"premature optimisation is the root of all evil" for sure, but getting a denial of service by the Google bot scanning your website, someone running Apache Bench from a smartphone on a GPRS network, or an unfortunate infinite loop client side (it happens) is not great. I think it's fine to play with CGI to learn, but I wouldn't push that to production.