Drawbacks
Calling a command generally means the invocation of a newly created process on the server. Starting the process can consume much more time and memory than the actual work of generating the output, especially when the program still needs to be interpreted or compiled. If the command is called often, the resulting workload can quickly overwhelm the web server.
The overhead involved in interpretation may be reduced by using compiled CGI programs, such as those in C/C++, rather than using Perl or other scripting languages. The overhead involved in process creation can be reduced by solutions such as FastCGI, or by running the application code entirely within the web server using extension modules such as mod_php.
Read more about this topic: Common Gateway Interface
Famous quotes containing the word drawbacks:
“France has neither winter nor summer nor morals—apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)