What is FastCGI?
FastCGI is the evolution of CGI. A CGI application runs on a web server and processes an HTTP requests (from a Web Browser for example). It receives a request, processes it and returns something for the Web Browser to display. The CGI application is launched by the web server (like IIS) when the request comes in, and it closes immediately after it has returned the reply. A CGI application can only process one request at a time. A FastCGI application does not need to close after a request, and can process many requests, one after the other. The benefit of this is that databases do not need to be opened and closed for each request and other variables (like a counter for example) may persist over many requests.
