The FastCGI extension for IIS 6 enables popular application frameworks
that support the FastCGI protocol to be hosted on the IIS web server in a high-performance
and reliable way. FastCGI provides a high-performance alternative to the Common
Gateway Interface (CGI), a standard way of interfacing external applications with
Web servers that has been supported as part of the IIS feature-set since the very
first release.
Make non-thread safe application frameworks run reliably on IIS
By providing a single-threaded execution environment for non-thread safe applications
FastCGI extension greatly improves reliability of such applications on IIS in production
environments.
Improve performance of CGI programs
CGI programs are executables launched by the web server for each request in order
to process the request and generate dynamic responses that are sent back to the
client. CGI has poor performance due to the high cost of starting and shutting down
a process for each request. FastCGI addresses the performance issues inherent to
CGI by providing a mechanism to reuse a single process over and over again for many
requests.
Host multiple versions of application frameworks on the same server
The FastCGI extension has very flexible configuration settings that allow hosting
of multiple applications frameworks or different versions of the same application
framework on the same IIS server.
Features
- Setting of per-process environment variables
- Configurable maximum number of FastCGI processes per application pool
- Configurable maximum number of requests that FastCGI process can handle
before being recycled by FastCGI extension
- Configurable idle timeout that can be used to optimize resource utilization
on a server
- Named Pipes and TCP based communication channel between FastCGI extension
and FastCGI processes