Anyone have much experience with FastCGI?

[gleepower]

I've looked at FastCGI for writing an interpreter, how hard is the specification to implement so that it works on the various different servers? (Apache, IIS, Nginx, etc)

[Jason Knight]

Been over a decade since I dealt with it directly. The "tricky" part (if I'm remembering this properly) is that for all intents and purposes you end up writing a web socket server listening on port 9000.

Done lazily the server handles all interactions as a single thread, done properly you have to dip into multi-threaded programming to handle more than one request at a time and that too is decidedly... tricky.

The "fast" part often being that how parameters are parsed is strictly in your hands directly off the HTTP headers. That too is a PITA that can be almost as big a challenge as writing the parser for your language.

[gleepower]

I can just have an event queue I think and keep everything on a single thread (maybe with a threadpool for I/O and DB operations).

Parsing the HTTP Headers isn't too hard no? The binary format in FastCGI looks pretty nice.