Figure 1
Open Market, Inc.
April 1996
The surge in the use of the Web by business has created a tremendous need for server extension applications that create dynamic content. These are the applications that will allow businesses to deliver products, services, and messages whose shape and content are in part determined by the interaction with, and knowledge of, the customers to which they are delivered.
This important movement away from static Web content is pushing the limits and exposing the weaknesses of the environment in which these applications are currently bound: CGI (Common Gateway Interface). Most importantly it does not offer the performance these applications require. A new communication infrastructure is needed to connect Web servers with these new applications. This is what led Open Market to develop FastCGI.
FastCGI is a fast, open, and secure Web server interface that solves the performance problems inherent in CGI, without introducing the overhead and complexity of proprietary APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).
This paper assumes that the reader has basic familiarity with Web technology and developing Web applications.
The de facto standard interface for Web server applications is CGI, which was first implemented in the NCSA server. CGI has many benefits:
CGI also has some significant drawbacks. The leading problem is performance: Since a new process is created for each request and thrown away when the request is done, efficiency is poor.
CGI also has limited functionality: It only supports a simple "responder" role, where the application generates the response that is returned to the client. CGI programs can't link into other stages of Web server request processing, such as authorization and logging.
In response to the performance problems for CGI, several vendors have developed APIs for their servers. The two most notable are NSAPI from Netscape and ISAPI from Microsoft. The freely available Apache server also has an API.
Applications linked into the server API may be significantly faster than CGI programs. The CGI startup/initialization problem is improved, because the application runs in the server process and is persistent across requests. Web server APIs also offer more functionality than CGI: you can write extensions that perform access control, get access to the server's log file, and link in to other stages in the server's request processing.
However, APIs sacrifice all of CGI's benefits. Vendor APIs have the following problems:
The FastCGI interface combines the best aspects of CGI and vendor APIs. Like CGI, FastCGI applications run in separate, isolated processes. FastCGI's advantages include:
The following sections describe the FastCGI interface, protocol, application library, and support in Open Market's WebServer products.
The functionality provided by the FastCGI interface is very similar to that provided by CGI. To best understand the FastCGI protocol, we review the CGI interface here. Basic CGI request processing proceeds as follows:
FastCGI is conceptually very similar to CGI, with two major differences:
Request processing in a single-threaded FastCGI application proceeds as follows:
FastCGI applications can run locally (on the same machine as the Web server) or remotely. For local applications, the server uses a full-duplex pipe to connect to the FastCGI application process. For remote applications, the server uses a TCP connection.
FastCGI applications can be single-threaded or multi-threaded. For single threaded applications, the Web server maintains a pool of processes (if the application is running locally) to handle client requests. The size of the pool is user configurable. Multi-threaded FastCGI applications may accept multiple connections from the Web server and handle them simultaneously in a single process. (For example, Java's built-in multi-threading, garbage collection, synchronization primitives, and platform independence make it a natural implementation language for multi-threaded FastCGI applications.)
FastCGI's ability to run applications remotely (over a TCP connection) provides some major benefits. These benefits are described in this section, along with some of the security issues that affect remote FastCGI applications.
Applications that run on organizational (external) Web servers and depend on internal databases can be a challenge to administer. Figure 1 shows a typical organization, with an external Web server, a firewall restricting access to the internal network, and internal databases and applications.
With CGI and vendor APIs, the application has to run on the Web server machine. This means the server administrator has to replicate the necessary database information onto the system hosting the Web server (which may be difficult to do in an automated way without compromising firewall security). Or, the administrator may build a "bridge" that allows access through the Web server to internal databases and applications (which is effectively re-inventing remote FastCGI).
With remote FastCGI, the applications can run on the internal network, simplifying the administrator's job. When used with appropriate firewall configuration and auditing, this approach provides a secure, high-performance, scalable way to bring internal applications and data to the external network.
For resource-intensive CGI and API applications, the Web server machine quickly becomes the bottleneck for overall throughput. The usual way to solve this performance problem is to buy a bigger, faster Web server machine, or to partition the Web site across several Web servers.
With remote FastCGI, the resource-intensive applications can be moved off the Web server machine, giving the server administrator additional flexibility in configuring the Web server. The administrator can configure FastCGI applications "behind the scenes" without having to change any content links or the external view of the Web site. The administrator can use several smaller, inexpensive server machines for applications, and can tailor each machine to the application it is hosting.
The two security issues with remote FastCGI connections are authentication and privacy. FastCGI applications should only accept connections from Web servers that they trust (the application library includes support for IP address validation). Future versions of the protocol will include support for applications authenticating Web servers, as well as support for running remote connections over secure transport protocols such as SSL or PCT.
This section offers a brief introduction to the protocol used on the connection between the Web server and FastCGI application. Most application developers will use the FastCGI application library and won't have to worry about the protocol details. However, specialized applications are free to implement the FastCGI protocol directly.
FastCGI uses a simple packet record format on the connection between the application and the Web server. The same record format is used in both directions and is outlined in Figure 2.
The protocol version field specifies the version of the FastCGI protocol that is in use. The type field specifies the type of the record (described in the following section). The request ID identifies this record to a particular request, allowing multiple requests to be multiplexed over a single connection. The data length field specifies the number of data bytes that follow.
The different FastCGI packet types are:
| FCGI_PARAMS | Used for sending name/value pairs (CGI environment variables) from the Web server to the application. |
| FCGI_STDIN | Used for sending the standard input from the Web server to the application. |
| FCGI_DATA | Used for sending filter data to the application (for more information, see the filter role described on page 7.) |
| FCGI_STDOUT | Used to send standard output from the application to the Web server. |
| FCGI_STDERR | Used to send standard error information from the application to the Web server. |
| FCGI_END_REQUEST | Ends the request (can be sent by either the server or the application). |
For complete protocol details, see the FastCGI Protocol Specification, available from the Web site listed at the end of this paper.
A major problem with CGI is its limited functionality: CGI programs can only provide simple responses to requests. FastCGI provides expanded functionality with support for three different application "roles":
Other roles will be defined in the future. For instance, a "logger" role would be useful, where the FastCGI program would receive the server's log entries for real-time processing and analysis.
The roles are described in more detail in the following sections.
FastCGI's Responder role is identical to the functionality provided by CGI today. When a request comes into the server, the FastCGI program generates the response that's returned to the client (typically an HTML page).
The Filter role allows a FastCGI application to process a requested file before it is returned to the client.
Let's assume that the Web server is configured so that all files with the .sgml extension are processed by a SGML-to-HTML FastCGI filter application, and the user accesses the following URL:
/document.sgml
After the Web server makes an access control decision and maps this URL to a content file, it invokes the FastCGI filter application with this file available as input. The FastCGI program's HTML output is sent back to the client, just as in the responder role. The process is outlined in Figure 3.
Filter applications can significantly improve performance by caching filter results (the server provides the modification time in the request information so that applications can flush the cache when the server file has been modified).
The Filter role is useful for:
The Authorizer role allows a FastCGI application to make an access control decision for a request. The FastCGI application is invoked with all of the request information, just as in the Responder role. If the authorizer application generates a "200 OK" HTTP result, the Web server assumes that access is allowed and proceeds with the request. (The Web server may process other access checks, including other FastCGI authorizers, before access is ultimately allowed.) If the application generates any other response, that response is returned to the client and the request is ended. The response can be any valid HTTP response, including "Access Denied" or "Redirect".
The Authorizer role is useful for:
Open Market has developed a FastCGI application library that implements the FastCGI protocol (hiding the protocol details from the developer). This library makes implementing FastCGI programs as easy as writing CGI applications.
The application library provides a replacement for the C language standard I/O (stdio) routines, such as printf() and gets(). The library converts references to standard input, standard output, and standard error to the FastCGI protocol. References to other files "fall through" to the underlying operating system standard I/O routines.
This approach has several benefits:
Here's a simple FastCGI application:
#include <fcgi_stdio.h>
void main(void)
{
int count = 0;
while(FCGI_Accept() >= 0) {
printf("Content-type: text/html\r\n");
printf("\r\n");
printf("Hello world!<br>\r\n");
printf("Request number %d.", count++);
}
exit(0);
}
This application returns a "Hello world" HTML response to the client. It also keeps a counter of the number of times it has been accessed, displaying the value of the counter at each request.
The fcgi_stdio.h header file provides the FastCGI replacement routines for the C standard I/O library. The FCGI_Accept() routine accepts a new request from the Web server.
The application library was designed to make migration of existing CGI programs as simple as possible. Many applications can be converted by adding a loop around the main request processing code and recompiling with the FastCGI application library. FastCGI applications have the following structure, with an initialization section and a request processing loop:
Initialize application;
while(FCGI_Accept() >= 0) {
Process request;
}
To ease migration to FastCGI, executables built with the application library can run as either CGI or FastCGI programs, depending on how they are invoked. The library detects the execution environment and automatically selects FastCGI or regular I/O routines, as appropriate.
After migration, developers can clean up their FastCGI applications for best performance:
Applications written in Perl, Tcl, and other scripting languages can be migrated by using a language interpreter built with the application library. FastCGI-integrated Tcl and Perl interpreters for popular Unix platforms are available from Open Market. The interpreters are backward-compatible: They can run standard Tcl and Perl applications.
This section describes the FastCGI support in the following Open Market server products:
For more information about FastCGI support, see the Open Market WebServer Installation and Configuration Guide.
FastCGI applications are configured with the server's configuration file. Configuration has two parts.
First, the server administrator defines an application class. For local applications, the application class specifies the details of running the FastCGI application, such as:
For remote applications, the class configuration information includes the host and TCP port to connect to. The Web server assumes that the FastCGI application has been started on the remote host. If a request comes in and the server can't connect to the FastCGI TCP port, the server logs an error and returns an error page to the client.
The second configuration step is mapping the application class to a role:
To simplify migration for existing CGI programs, the WebServer provides a simple way to install new FastCGI programs without having to reconfigure the server. However, this approach doesn't offer all of the performance benefits of FastCGI application classes.
The WebServer treats any file with the extension .fcg as a FastCGI application. When a request corresponds to such a file, the WebServer creates a new FastCGI process to handle the request, and shuts down the process when the request is complete (just as in CGI). In this mode of operation performance is comparable to CGI. Future versions of the WebServer will improve performance by automatically caching processes and re-using them for subsequent requests.
FastCGI programs can improve performance by caching information in the application process. For applications that require frequent but expensive operations such as validating a username/password in an external database for each request, this technique can significantly improve performance.
To improve the effectiveness of this technique, the WebServer implements session affinity. When session affinity is enabled, the WebServer arranges for all requests in a user session to be handled by the same FastCGI application process. What constitutes a "session" is configurable. The default configuration uses the WebServer's built-in session tracking facility to identify user sessions. However, the server administrator can use any part of the request information for the session affinity mapping: the URL path, the client's hostname, the username, etc.
How fast is FastCGI? The answer depends on the application. This section contains some real FastCGI performance measurements, as well as guidelines for estimating the FastCGI speedup.
We measured the relative performance of CGI, FastCGI, and static files on the Open Market WebServer, using a simple application that generates a fixed number of output bytes. The following table shows the measured request processing time for different request types on a typical platform. The times are measured from the client perspective and include client, server, and application processing time.
|
Static file
|
21ms + 0.19ms per Kbyte
|
|
FastCGI
|
22ms + 0.28ms per Kbyte
|
|
CGI
|
59ms + 0.37ms per Kbyte
|
FastCGI performance is comparable to serving static files, and significantly better than CGI (clearly showing the high overhead for process creation). Real applications have an additional time component: process initialization, which should be added to overall request processing time.
Let's use this data to estimate the speedup from migrating a typical database CGI application to FastCGI. Assume the application takes 50ms to initialize the database connection and generates 5K of output data. Request performance can be computed as follows:
| CGI | 59ms + 50ms + (0.37ms)(5) = 111ms |
| FastCGI | 22ms + (0.28ms)(5) = 23ms |
In this example, FastCGI has a 5x performance advantage over CGI, mostly due to savings from not having to create and initialize new processes for each request.
Today's Web business applications need a platform that's fast, open, maintainable, straightforward, stable, and secure. FastCGI's design meets these requirements, and provides for a logical extension from proven and widely deployed CGI technology. This allows developers to take advantage of FastCGI's benefits without losing their existing investment in CGI applications.
For more information about Open Market and our products, visit our Web site at:http://www.openmarket.com/
For more information about the FastCGI protocol and the developer's kit, and the latest information about FastCGI standardization and support in other Web servers, visit the FastCGI project page at:http://www.openmarket.com/fastcgi/