This 3rd party module provides support for the FastCGI protocol. FastCGI is a language independent, scalable, open extension to CGI that provides high performance and persistence without the limitations of server specific APIs.
FastCGI applications are not limited to a particular development language (the protocol is open). FastCGI application libraries currently exist for Perl, C/C++, Java, Python, and TCL.
FastCGI applications use (TCP or Unix) sockets to communicate with the web server. This scalable architecture allows applications to run on the same platform as the web server or on many machines scattered across an enterprise network.
FastCGI applications are portable to other web server platforms. FastCGI is supported either directly or through commercial extensions by most popular web servers.
FastCGI applications are fast because they're persistent. There is no per-request startup and initialization overhead. This makes possible the development of applications which would otherwise be impractical within the CGI paradigm (e.g. a huge Perl script, or an application which requires a connection to one or more databases).
For more information on FastCGI, go to the FastCGI website. To receive FastCGI related announcements and notifications of module updates, send mail to fastcgi-announce-request@idle.com with "subscribe" in the Subject field. To participate in the discussion of mod_fastcgi and FastCGI application development, send mail to fastcgi-developers-request@idle.com with "subscribe" in the Subject field.
The purpose for the IBM HTTP Server Fast CGI plugin is to provide an alternative method of producing dynamic content. FastCgi is protocol extension to CGIs that provides higher performance and persistence without the limitation of server specific API's.