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Comment by untech | Hacker News Reader

I understand the sentiment, but to be fair, CGI doesn’t give you an infinite scalability. AWS Labmda based solution is far less susceptible to something like HN hug-of-death.

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CGI can definitely scale infinitely!! It's stateless.

PHP can scale to all of Facebook's front ends, and so can CGI. Because they are stateless.

Same with FastCGI. FastCGI just lets you reuse the process, so you don't have the "cold start" every time

> CGI had the original "cold start problem"

It's just that nobody has implemented a cloud that uses the CGI or FastCGI interfaces.

I quoted this same article in a blog post yesterday:

Comments on Scripting, CGI, and FastCGI - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2024/06/cgi.html

This maybe gets to the core of why the author’s assertion is incorrect: they’re comparing a programming language to an execution environment.

Yeah, PHP can scale infinitely… if you provide it with the necessary server resources to do so. PHP is not going to scale infinitely on a Raspberry Pi.

This dynamically scaling server resource is Lambda. Hell, you can even run PHP on Lambda these days the comparison really doesn’t work.

We often hit lambda max quotas and scaling limits:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/gettingstarted-...

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/lambda-concurre...

Instead your wallet gets ddos'd.

But it’s entirely susceptible to your wallet being hugged to death if someone decides to ddos you.

That’s a trade off many businesses are very happy to make! Spike in traffic = spike in sales. For an actual DDOS there’s always WAF firewalling.

I have to admit I don’t get the lambda hate. You don’t have to use them but there is a valid use case for them.

Lambda doesn't either. Unless you ask AWS support nicely.

> but to be fair, CGI doesn’t give you an infinite scalability.

That your startup with three users will never need.

Your startup with a million users will not need it either

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