> Have you timed it? I literally gave a timing number in my comment. The >1 second time was for a very unusual circumstance. Unless you timed PHP startup time

> Have you timed it? I literally gave a timing number in my comment. The >1 second time was for a very unusual circumstance. Unless you timed PHP startup time using straight CGI (not mod_cgi, nor FastCGI) on a Lustre file system about 15 years ago, with the appropriate set of extensions enabled for what our application needed, you can't really compare the two. > PHP starts up from scratch on every request Congratulations. Now getting back to your request to "Name one", the PHP documentation at https://www.php.net/manual/en/install.unix.commandline.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/install.unix.commandline.php gives essentially the same answer as I did: "By default, PHP is built as both a CLI and CGI program, which can be used for CGI processing. If you are running a web server that PHP has module support for, you should generally go for that solution for performance reasons."