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This is stupid. I use cgi all the time. My cheap Hetzner single core vps can fork a Linux process 10k times a second, so I don't want to hear about forking be

This is stupid. I use cgi all the time. My cheap Hetzner single core vps can fork a Linux process 10k times a second, so I don't want to hear about forking being too slow until Django can serve pages that fast. Cgi is still the simplest way to get a basic web script running, without worrying about lingering state between page hits, etc. Doesn't Linus always shut down such discussions regarding the Linux kernel with "we don't break userspace"? Python should learn something from that.

postpawl 5y ago
Interesting, I’ve never seen the cgi module used before. It’s good to know it exists. Here’s an example for those interested: https://dzone.com/articles/python-simple-http-server-with-cgi-scripts-enabled https://dzone.com/articles/python-simple-http-server-with-cg...
- throwaway81523 5y ago
  Yep, if you want to throw a ghetto GUI onto your python script, easiest way is to run CGIHTTPServer (now renamed in py3), write some 1990's style basic HTML, and point a browser at it. Use for customer facing sites? No. But for your internal status checking script or personal photo tagger, it's low fuss, low dependencies, and completely practical.
deleted 5y ago
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sciurus 5y ago
It's not forking the process that's a concern, it's what happens next. How slow is Django to start up? Do you want to pay that penalty for every request?
- throwaway81523 5y ago
  Django as a cgi does sound painful, but that's because it's huge. Most cgi scripts I've written are quite simple. And they rarely have to serve 100s of requests per second. And of course it's possible to optimize the startup time, e.g. by dumping an already-initialized version of the script (even django). Emacs has done that forever. It wouldn't surprise me if there is some way to do it in Python. I remember reading somewhere that amazon.com was originally implemented as CGI's written in C. And, Perl cgi scripts served the whole web for many years, on servers much slower than what we have now.

postpawl 5y ago

Interesting, I’ve never seen the cgi module used before. It’s good to know it exists. Here’s an example for those interested: https://dzone.com/articles/python-simple-http-server-with-cgi-scripts-enabled https://dzone.com/articles/python-simple-http-server-with-cg...

throwaway81523 5y ago
Yep, if you want to throw a ghetto GUI onto your python script, easiest way is to run CGIHTTPServer (now renamed in py3), write some 1990's style basic HTML, and point a browser at it. Use for customer facing sites? No. But for your internal status checking script or personal photo tagger, it's low fuss, low dependencies, and completely practical.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sciurus 5y ago

It's not forking the process that's a concern, it's what happens next. How slow is Django to start up? Do you want to pay that penalty for every request?

throwaway81523 5y ago
Django as a cgi does sound painful, but that's because it's huge. Most cgi scripts I've written are quite simple. And they rarely have to serve 100s of requests per second. And of course it's possible to optimize the startup time, e.g. by dumping an already-initialized version of the script (even django). Emacs has done that forever. It wouldn't surprise me if there is some way to do it in Python. I remember reading somewhere that amazon.com was originally implemented as CGI's written in C. And, Perl cgi scripts served the whole web for many years, on servers much slower than what we have now.