We understand the tuning parameters for these processes a bit more since this post was written a year and a half ago (We hit a magic phase shift for our other F

We understand the tuning parameters for these processes a bit more since this post was written a year and a half ago (We hit a magic phase shift for our other FastCGI processes, at which point our servers started falling over from 4000 users worth of FastCGIs. "Good thing we didn't listen to Geoffrey when he suggested we run an Apache for each user.") FastCGI static-cat should work (indeed, one of the original design intents was making this switch easy, if we decided to do it). But I disagree that language becomes irrelevant in this case: you still care about memory usage (since this will influence how many users you can support) and loading an entire interpreter can be pretty costly. I do agree that IO should be essentially comparable. As for the reinvention, all of these features are what you would normally find in Apache. But Apache is a large, complicated piece of software, and we don't want it to have access to arbitrary user files if it is compromised.