Revolution's CGI Module - where is it????

[Alex Rice]

On Wednesday, July 9, 2003, at 01:05  AM, Antn at aol.com wrote:

> Is the programming based on the same Revolution language as the 
> applications version?

It's just the runrev engine, trimmed down and without a GUI.

> How fast is it?

It's the same runrev engine we all use- and it's fast.

> How many instant requests can it handle, or how many requests can it 
> process/hour?
> Is this "Enterprise" Grade (excuse the IT-tekkie talk), in other 
> words, can it scale up to mission critical, hyper-volume sites and 
> maintain stability?

Usually CGI programs are not deployed in extremely high traffic web 
sites.

The reason for this is that the CGI interface is designed such that the 
web server starts the program up every time a request is made. That is 
a fork() call for every single request on the web app, and that's a lot 
of cpu cycles. (although with 3GHz multi-cpu servers, does it even 
matter?)

FastCGI, and PCGI were developed to address this shortcoming with CGI.

In contrast, web application servers such as PHP, ZOPE, Web Objects, 
Cold Fusion, and Tomcat are long running processes which the web server 
communicates with via a proxy, or the web app process is embedded in 
the web server as an extension. For each request made, the web app 
process is already in memory and probably already has a database 
connection opened up. Much faster.

So it all depends on your requirements.

> Can it be installed in a regular CGI directory on a regular webspace 
> account without accessing the root server?

Yes.

I'm sure someone else will answer the other questions. I don't actually 
use the CGI module. This is just my knowledge and what I've gleaned 
from the list.

Alex Rice, Software Developer
Architectural Research Consultants, Inc.
http://ARCplanning.com