Serving 200M requests per day with a CGI-bin

We invented PHP and FastCGI mainly to get away from the performance hit of starting a new process just to handle a web request!

It was only a few years ago that I realized that modern hardware means that it really isn't prohibitively expensive to do that any more - this benchmark gets to 2,000/requests a second, and if you can even get to a few hundred requests a second it's easy enough to scale across multiple instances these days.

I have seen AWS Lambda described as the CGI model reborn and that's a pretty fair analogy.

Yes! Note that the author is using a technology that wasn't available when I too was writing cgi_bin programs in the 00's: Go. It produces AOT compiled executables but is also significantly easier to develop in and safer than trying to do the same with C/C++ in the 00's. Back then we tended to use Perl (now basically dead). Perl and Python would incur significant interpreter startup and compilation costs. Java was often worse in practice.

> I have seen AWS Lambda described as the CGI model reborn and that's a pretty fair analogy.

Yes, it's almost exactly identical to managed FastCGI. We're back to the challenges of deployment: can't we just upload and run an executable? But of course so many technologies make things much, much more complicated than that.