ISAPI is OK for some things, but I've found it about the worste
native interface of them all.
> Still, I'm curious; yours is the first suggestion I've seen in a while
> that straight CGI is a particularly fast way of running a heavily
> database-backed site like ebay, on any hardware. Could you elaborate?
Not so much a database-backed site... on systems where the process size
is small and where the process is CPU and I/O intensive, CGI is sometimes
the best. It helps to avoid contention in the code, and is, of course,
dead reliable. With lots of RAM, the process stays in memory, so the
fork and exec cost is negligible.