Serving 200 million requests per day with a cgi-bin
In the early 2000s, we used to write a lot of CGI programs.
This was the primary way to make websites dynamic at the time. These CGI programs were usually written in Perl, but sometimes in C or other languages to increase performance.
The CGI mechanism is conceptually simple but powerful. When the web server receives an incoming request for a CGI script (e.g. /~jakegold/cgi-bin/guestbook.cgi), it:
Sets up environment variables containing request metadata (HTTP headers, query parameters, request ...
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