Serving 200M requests per day with a CGI-bin

Surprised with the choice of Apache. There are better choices for serving CGI nowadays. The only reason for still running Apache is you have legacy cruft that requires Apache (like .htaccess).

Apache is still a solid option. It does everything, works with everything and is easy to configure. Performance is perfectly fine for ~99% of everything.

I think the point of the experiment was to see how fast the old-school tech stack would go on modern hardware.

I host 1200 vhosts off apache as an authenticating proxy, and run Al sorts of random scripts.

This is all internal use though, I don’t need to scale to hundreds of concurrent users let alone thousands. Apache and cgi bin is fine.

Apache's httpd is great, reliable, fast, and feature-full, and you don't have to deal with Nginx's ongoing conflict over the the open source vs commercial offerings. That conflict has caused needless pain, like e.g. that quirk around dns resolution where if you put the hostname under proxy_pass it only used to resolve it on start-up and ignored TTL (not sure if it's still doing that). There were work-arounds on the open source version, like using a variable instead, but that wasn't necessary in the commercial offering.

In the post I also showed results for a little `gohttpd` program running the CGI program:

https://github.com/Jacob2161/cgi-bin/blob/main/gohttpd/main....

See as "Benchmarking (writes|reads) using Go net/http"

It was faster but not by very much. Running CGI programs is just forking processes, so Apache's forking model works just about as well as anything else.

Apache works great for me and my small to medium loads. Sure it's not as fast as some of the lighter choices but the bottleneck isn't the webserver, it's all the database queries and network latencies.