Web and XML Glossary

FastCGI is an extension of the CGI which eliminates its drawbacks and provides high performance, while remaining highly compatible with existing CGI applications. FastCGI is conceptually very similar to CGI, with two major differences. As the first difference, FastCGI processes are persistent, after finishing a request, they wait for a new request instead of exiting. The second difference is that, instead of using Operating System environment variables and pipes, the FastCGI protocol multiplexes the environment information, standard input, output and error over a single full-duplex connection. This allows FastCGI programs to run on remote machines, using TCP connections between the HTTP Server and the FastCGI application.