Fast Engines, Inc. this week announced the release of Fast.Serv Pro, the company’s new FastCGI Web server plug-in.
Fast.Serv Pro is designed to increase the server performance of applications that use the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) by up to ten times or more. Fast Engines said the plug-in achieves this performance upgrade by porting FastCGI to a Web server, breaking the CGI “bottleneck” and enabling maximum Web server performance.
According to Fast Engines, Fast.Serv Pro delivers even better performance than the Application Program Interfaces (APIs) that are offered by Web
server. The company said that APIs are vendor-specific, language-dependent, and hence, prone to security risks. APIs lack the process isolation that is inherent in standard CGI, and run the risk of crashing the entire Web server if they crash.
The main drawback for standard CGI scripts is that each CGI script must be
started up as a new process every time a browser requests it. Once the request has been processed, the connection is immediately dropped. The FastCGI protocol, however, maintains a persistent connection, which is where the performance gains come from.
Fast.Serv Pro is available for a retail price of $2,000 per server, or $8,500
for a pack of five server licenses. An annual Maintenance contract, including
Support and Updates, is $600 per server or $2550 per five pack.
For additional information about Fast.Serv Pro, visit the Fast Engines Web site.