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[Alex Tweedly]

On 12/05/2013 23:16, Richard Gaskin wrote:
>
> Worse, my aim here is to run all this in the most stringent of 
> environments:  a CGI, where the app must initialize, run, return a 
> result, and die, all in as small a fraction of a second as possible.
>
(partly tongue-in-cheek)

Why must it run in this environment ?  Why not run this as a local 
"back-end" service on your server - keep the process running, with the 
persistent data copied as an in-memory array, serve look-up requests 
from some private port and return the results, and then wait for next 
request.

Your CGI then starts up, figures out what it's doing, sends a request to 
the local back-end service, gets the reply, return the result to the 
end-user and dies - while the back-end just waits for the next request.

Oh, I know, lots of assumptions about persistence, full control over the 
server/VPS, update frequency, etc. - but that might not be as weird and 
wonderful as some other things you could try.

-- Alex.