FastCGI

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FastCGI is a protocol for interfacing interactive programs with a web server. FastCGI is a variation on the earlier Common Gateway Interface (CGI); FastCGI's main aim is to reduce the overhead associated with interfacing the web server and CGI programs, allowing a server to handle more web page requests at once.

History

CGI is a protocol for interfacing external applications to web servers. CGI applications run in separate processes, which are created at the start of each request and torn down at the end. This "one new process per request" model makes CGI programs very simple to implement, but limits efficiency and scalability. At high loads, the operating system process creation and destruction overhead becomes significant. In addition, the CGI process model limits resource reuse techniques (such as reusing database connections, in-memory caching, etc.).

To address the scalability shortcomings of CGI, Open Market developed FastCGI and first introduced it in their webserver product in the mid-1990s. Open Market originally developed FastCGI in part as a competitive response to Netscape's proprietary, in-process API (NSAPI) for developing Web applications.

Although initially developed by Open Market, FastCGI was implemented by a number of other webserver makers. The FastCGI approach, however, competed against other techniques which also aimed to speed and simplify server-subprogram communications. Apache modules such as mod_perl and mod_php appeared around the same time, and they also quickly gained popularity. Today, all of these various approaches (including CGI) remain in common use.

Implementation details

Instead of creating a new process for each request, FastCGI uses persistent processes to handle a series of requests. These processes are owned by the FastCGI server, not the web server.[1]

To service an incoming request, the web server sends environment information and the page request itself to a FastCGI process over a socket (in the case of local FastCGI processes on the web server) or TCP connection (for remote FastCGI processes in a server farm). Responses are returned from the process to the web server over the same connection, and the web server subsequently delivers that response to the end-user. The connection may be closed at the end of a response, but both the web server and the FastCGI service processes persist.[2]

Each individual FastCGI process can handle many requests over its lifetime, thereby avoiding the overhead of per-request process creation and termination. Processing of multiple requests simultaneously can be achieved in several ways: by using a single connection with internal multiplexing (i.e. multiple requests over a single connection); by using multiple connections; or by a combination of these techniques. Multiple FastCGI servers can be configured, increasing stability and scalability.

Web site administrators and programmers can find that the separation of web applications from the web server in FastCGI has many advantages over embedded interpreters (mod_perl, mod_php, etc.). This separation allows server and application processes to be restarted independently – an important consideration for busy web sites. It also enables the implementation of per-application / hosting service security policies, which is an important requirement for ISPs and web hosting companies.[3] Different types of incoming requests can be distributed to specific FastCGI servers which have been equipped to handle those particular types of requests efficiently.

Web Servers that implement FastCGI

Note: unless stated, completeness of FastCGI implementation is unknown

Language bindings for the FastCGI API

FastCGI can be implemented in any language that supports network sockets. (Since "FastCGI is a protocol, not an implementation," it is not tightly bound to any language at all.) APIs exist[13] for:

Recent frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Catalyst, Django, Kepler and Plack allow use with either the embedded interpreters (mod_ruby, mod_perl, mod_python or mod_lua, for example), or FastCGI.

References

  1. ↑ "FastCGI Specification". Open Market, Inc. 1996. 
  2. ↑ "FastCGI:A High-Performance Web Server Interface". Open Market, Inc. 1996. Retrieved 4 October 2010. 
  3. ↑ Paul Heinlein (1 November 1998). "FastCGI: Persistent Applications for Your Web Server". Linux Journal. Retrieved 4 October 2010. 
  4. ↑ FastCGI apache module mod_fcgid
  5. ↑ Debian bug #450748: Please add support for TCP/IP FastCGI servers
  6. ↑ Issues with Apache 2.4 and PHP-FPM
  7. ↑ libapache-mod-fastcgi on Github
  8. ↑ FastCGI – The Forgotten Treasure/ Section 2.3.
  9. ↑ FastCGI for Cherokee
  10. ↑ FastCGI HOWTO for Hiawatha
  11. ↑ FastCGI for Lighttpd
  12. ↑ "FastCGI Extension for IIS6.0 - RTM". FastCGI for IIS. Microsoft. 2008-02-28. Retrieved 2008-02-29. 
  13. ↑ Application Libraries / Development Kits
  14. ↑
  15. ↑ ExtPascal
  16. ↑
  17. ↑ Goanna Eiffel
  18. ↑ jFastCGI, a Java Servlet implementing FastCGI protocol
  19. ↑ There are a number of FastCGI modules for Perl: FCGI (a compiled module written in C), FCGI::Async (for asynchronous FastCGI applications), AnyEvent::FCGI (for AnyEvent-based applications), FCGI::EV (for EV-based applications), CGI::Fast (Perl CGI-like interface for FastCGI), FCGI::Client (a FastCGI client library), and Net::FastCGI (constants and functions to build and parse FastCGI messages).
  20. ↑
  21. ↑ REAL Studio Web Edition, builds web apps called via FastCGI

External links

Server-side
Apache modules
Topics
Client-side
Others
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