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> hardly anybody uses it anymore anyway

Lots of PHP setups do.

Lots? Really?

PHP was one of the first to have a dedicated apache module. Perl is much more likely to be CGI.

I seem to recall cPanel defaulting to suPHP (which uses CGI).

Yeah this is true - a lot of hosting providers run PHP as a CGI as it allows them to run the PHP process under the user account (although it is very slow, and RUID2 is a better solution).

If you're not running mod_cgi can this affect the system in any way?

Thanks!

Yes, lots. nginx + php is very popular.

Is fastCGI the same thing as CGI, for this case, though?

They would be too slow to be useful at any kind of real load. Are you sure you're not thinking of FastCGI? That doesn't pass data through the environment, it goes over a socket.

Yeah - it is really slow, but a surprisingly large number of hosting providers run it that way under cPanel.

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